[aprssig] South/central virginia and Tennessee

[Robert Bruninga]

> Looks like a rogue mobile on RF...
> It came through our area about 4 days ago....

Stephen, ah, glad to find someone in the area.  I hope I can
enlist you to incite some progress on the digipeatrs in the
area.

I was disappointed during my 300 mile drive along I-81
surrounded by digipeaters on mountains on both sides for 5 hours
not to ever see once, a recommended voice repeater object show
up on my APRS radio.  I appologize if there was one and I missed
it.  But the digipeaters in that area are missing a great
opportunity to the amateur radio mobile public.

Every APRS digipeater is responsible for 3 things:
1) Digipeating local actiivty
2) Announcing its New-N capabilities
3) Transmitting the locally recommended VOICE repeater FREQUENCY
object for mobiles in its immediate footprint.

Bottom line.  APRS is an INFO distribution system!  If a mobile
is in range of ANY APRS digipeater, then his APRS system should
show three things:
1) Packets from all local activity
2) Information on the digi's capabilities
3) The recommended Voice Frequency in that immediate area.

I ask that all digipeater owners in the country get motivated to
complete this third aspect of the New-N paradigm.  Please read
all about it.  Just Google the words "APRS localinfo" without
the quotes.

I think Eastern Tenessee was also rather bleak and there is no
New-N support through Knoxville I think.  Here are my recent
tracks.  If anyone knows how to get a different scale eeastern
USA map from FINDU, let me know.  All I can find is the USA map.

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/track.cgi?call=wb4apr-9&geo=usa.geo
&start=1000

On that link you can see the gaps around Knoxville and Eastern
Ohio.  We need to educate the country that although RF APRS is a
purely 100% local RF system, that it does have responsibility to
transitent mobiles as part of a national system.

Clubs (even without any APRS members) should be embarassed to
have their area be a black hole to the motoring amateur radio
public.

Can we build up a map of black holes and appeal to the national
ham radio community to fill them even if they don't use APRS?
That is why I feel that integrating LOCAL voice freqeucny info
on APRS is so important.  It makes the local ham (non-aprs)
aware of APRS every time an APRS use comes up on a visiting
repeater and says "I saw your repeater on APRS, thought I'd
check in..."  That may be the first visiting mobile to check in
to that repeater in a week!  So many of them have PL's that
without this local info LIVE, it is hard to visit these days...

Thanks, Bob, WB4APR