[aprssig] APRS<=>E-mail

[Jason KG4WSV]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:54 PM, Kurt Kochendarfer <ke7kus at gmail.com> wrote:

> The real issue with Ben's suggestion, apart from someone already in the
> business implementing it as an "add-on", is cost.  Hosting of the scale
> needed to support a global APRS Mail service would cost a significant
> amount of money.  You would either need a hosting agreement with an
> existing company (high monthly cost), or you would need a big fat
> internet pipe and about $10000-15000 in hardware to do it yourself.
> (High monthly cost and high hardware cost.)

I'm also "in the business", and an email server capable of dealing
with APRS<->email traffic certainly doesn't need to be that well
endowed, simply because APRS doesn't/can't handle that much traffic.

The _work_ involved in doing it right would be plenty, and it needs to
be hosted in a datacenter and backed up in another datacenter
(preferably geographically and network-wise somewhat distant from the
first), but the hardware and bandwidth requirements just aren't all
that much, IMO.

-Jason
kg4wsv