[aprssig] Kindly dealing with annoying behavior

[John Goerzen]

Hi folks,

Over at http://bit.ly/IOP667 you can see some raw packets.  (Note: I 
will disable that redirect in a few days; my point is not to "name 
names" here, but to get some advice.)

There are a few things happening there:

  * Roughly every 10 minutes, 24/7 every day, sending a message to BLN0
  * Same thing, also roughly every 10 minutes, sending a message to BLN1
  * Not necessarily visible in this list, but also it is sending a
    "Welcome to [cityname]" message to anyone that sends them a
    message.  Or possibly anyone that comes in range?  I'm not clear.
  * All of the above is happening on RF.

The first two items are the ones that bug me.  They pop up with an 
audible alert on a lot of APRS devices and software, including my 
TH-D72A and Xastir.  I also see evidence of people that are confused by 
it, thinking the message was sent specifically to them.  (Replies back 
to the station sending the BLNs saying "OK" or "no thanks" or something 
- which then causes them to get "Welcome...")

I would like to kindly help the person running this do so in a more 
ham-friendly manner -- perhaps redirecting what is some enthusiasm into 
a better path.  Does anyone here have feedback on the best way to go 
about doing that, without coming off in a way that will make the person 
defensive and dig in their heels?  I do not know the email address for 
the person, incidentally, and am not sure if I could get onto any 
repeater that the person also uses.

If the person needs configuration help with the software, where is a 
good place to send them?  According to aprs.fi, the software is APRSIS32 
version 08.  I am a Linux person and although I am quite familiar with 
the entire AX.25 stack on Linux, I have never used it on Windows at all, 
and as the person is about an hour's drive away would probably be giving 
suggestions over the air or phone - so if there is an APRSIS32 resource 
somewhere I could point them at, that'd be great.

On an unrelated note, I also noticed a huge volume of APRS traffic on RF 
in the local area today.  There appears to be a cell phone running 
APRSDroid dropping packets onto APRS-IS every 18s, and somebody is 
gating them onto RF putting WIDE2-2 on the via path.  It is not entirely 
clear to me what station is doing that.  I have a couple of candidates 
and have dropped a friendly email to them.

Thank you,

John
KR0L

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