General APRS questions (beyond just YAAC)
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Note that this discussion group is for issues with or related to YAAC. If you have a question of wider interest, there has long been a general APRS mailing list, the APRS Special Interest Group, hosted by TAPR. All the big names in APRS subscribe to that list (including the father of APRS, Bob Bruninga WB4APR himself); the author of YAAC is also a subscriber to APRSSIG. So asking your question there might get a faster or more informative answer if it is not a YAAC-specific issue.
To subscribe to that list, send an email to aprssig-subscribe@tapr.org.
What would be a good way to promulgate good and courteous APRS practices?
I see a lot of people who just set their systems up for the most digi-peats and fastest beacons they can. Some common issues in my area:
1) Setting for WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 or WIDE2-2 when simply setting for WIDE1-1 will do. In my area, you can almost always hit an IGate within one repeat.
2) People setting beaconing rates of 20 to 120 seconds instead of using SmartBeaconing or no faster than 180 seconds (mobile) or about 10 minutes (fixed)
3) Aircraft & balloons using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 or greater when they probably should be going direct. They don't seem to realize at those altitudes they are hitting every digi between Mexico and Canada.
4) People setting up more digis in areas already saturated with digis.
That's a very good question. They've been arguing about that on the APRSSIG mailing list for years. :-)
In YAAC, I tried to set the defaults sanely, but I had to allow changes to "marginal" settings that would be needed for certain edge cases. Alas, that allows abusive settings as well.
Unfortunately, YAAC can't automatically detect when the station is located in a unique area (such as southern California with 200-mile-range digipeaters). I'd have to do some thinking, and I really don't like the idea of adding either forced overrides or "nagging" in YAAC to use more "preferred" settings that might actually not be appropriate for the specific environment.
Because not everyone has messaging capability on their APRS system nor do they look at the bulletins, but nearly all will look at their local aprs.fi or openaprs map, I was playing with setting some "hint" objects around my QTH that people could click on and read suggestions. The only technological drawback is that by my understanding the free text for an object or item is only 43 characters. Sometimes I can get much more than that to work. Also, some folks have told me that this is rude in itself, which I can kind of understand -- no one died and made me the APRS deity for my area. I mentioned once to our State/Section Manager that we could use a section wide APRS coordinator, but that never happened.