Trying to identify YAAC phenomenon

[Gary Ross Hoffman]

Hello,

Besides my home station(s), I also help manage an APRS station at the local Emergency Management Agency. We are using the latest version of YAAC. Unfortunately I'm not the only person who works with it. Today I noticed that YAAC would occasionally "beep" at me, jump to another map location, and display four arrows (cross hairs?) that together resembled a Maltese Cross. I'm guessing that this is an alert of some kind, but don't know what it means. What triggers this and how do I turn it off?

Thanks.

[Andrew Pavlin]

What this means is that some station is reporting Emergency status, either by the Mic-E status code of all three status bits == 0, or having the literal text "EMERGENCY" somewhere in their free comment text. Either, according to the APRS protocol specification, indicates that the station is reporting a true emergency, and all other stations should be informed of this status and be prepared to offer assistance as appropriate. Unfortunately, some people are proudly beaconing that they are in the "xxx" EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CENTER when it is not an emergency condition there. In this case, the flashing arrows would be red (indicating emergency). Flashing arrows can also appear in orange (priority) or yellow (special, if enabled), but do not cause the automatic pan to center the reporting station that happens for emergency-reporting stations. Green flashing arrows (with an auto-pan) happens only when the local user explicitly asks YAAC to find the location of a specific station, to indicate the found location.

At the present time, there is no way to turn the emergency auto-pan off. However, since there seem to be more offending stations showing up (reporting emergency status in non-emergency conditions), I will be adding the option to stop the auto-pan for emergency-reporting stations (the beep and flashing arrows will still happen) in the next build of YAAC.

[John]

I have had to black list a couple stations for doing this.