[aprssig] Simplifying Europe to traceable WIDEn-N

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Mon, 9 Jun 2008, Dr.Oliver Raabe wrote:

> Kai Gunter Brandt wrote:
>> Yes the net should be analyzed before the proposals and get some
>> experience from other countries etc.
>
> We started to change the system to the original NEWn-N (WIDEn-N) in DL and
> HB9 one year ago (now there are about 60 percent of all digis in DL within
> the worldwide standard).

   We in Finland have preferred WIDEn-N, too, and have been publishing 
Finnish articles and web pages on APRS saying WIDEn-N is the way to go. 
It's simple to have a single configuration, and almost everyone has set it 
up like that here.

   I suppose RELAY/WIDE/TRACE is still enabled on most of our network for 
backwards compatibility, and sometimes using TRACEn-N is convenient to get 
a complete trace for debugging purposes (instead of only the first hop 
traced in WIDEn-N). But the published "how do I set up APRS" documents 
only say "use WIDE2-2".

   There are two proposals in the IARU Region 1 papers, CT08_C5_33 NRRL 
Common standards for APRS.pdf and CT08_C5_09 EDR Guidelines for APRS.pdf. 
EDR's proposal is to go for TRACEn-N only, and disable WIDEn-N completely, 
which would break the system, according to my statistics, for most users, 
until they change their configuration. NRRL's proposal is to go for 
WIDEn-N. Seems good to me.

   Matti OH2MQK pointed out that it would be useful to specify that packets 
with too many hops would be dropped, based on the *sum* of requested 
digipeating hops in the original packets. Say, if the limit would be set 
to 3 hops in a given country, packets having WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 would 
survive, but (for example) WIDE1-1,WIDE1-1,WIDE1-1,WIDE1-1 would be 
dropped. The same limit would apply to TRACEn-N. The exact limit could, of 
course, vary, so if the folks living on the countryside with really few 
igates want to have a larger limit, it'd be fine and up to the digipeater 
operators to decide and lift it up to 4 or something.

   Also, since we don't have too many useful fill-in digis around here in 
Finland, I've been telling locals to use a path of WIDE2-2 or WIDE1-1, but 
not WIDE2-1. It has the added benefit of having a clear way to see that 
the packet has not been digipeated yet. If you transmit with WIDE2-1, you 
can't know for sure (when looking at packets on the APRS-IS) whether it 
has been digipeated yet, or not. There are still some digipeaters out 
there which decrement the counter but do not insert their callsigns (not 
traceable). Yes, they should be fixed.

   The most important part is cutting the paths of those 
"RELAY,WIDE7-7,TRACE7-7,WIDE7-7" packets.

   - Hessu, OH7LZB