[aprssig] Beaconing repeaters as stations?

[Andrew P.]

Greetings, all.

I've been noticing some possibly incorrect behavior from some of our colleagues' stations connected to the APRS-IS. I'm receiving I-Gated station position reports (not object or item reports) with a sender's "callsign" of "146.82-". The position data is correctly formatted, and the symbol code and comment describes an analog repeater. But there is no actual FCC-assigned callsign for the sending station. I'm assuming this data must be getting injected from an APRS-IS client.

Is this correct?  Seems like this should have been sent as an object or item report. Or is this some offbeat work-around so repeaters can use AFRS? Seems like they should work fine with the object record, and the frequency is in the wrong position now for auto-tune to work.

The actual record is:

}146.82->APOBJ,qAR,N3HF-5:!3830.10N/07544.13Wr PL 156.7 Net 9PM M. Salisbury MD

Just curious.

Andrew Pavlin, KA2DDO
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry