Eastern Ontario APRS Tips

no longer maintained by Brad - VE3BSM (@gmail.com)

Updates:

Executive Summary:

Mobile Stations: set PATH to "WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1"
Home Stations: set PATH to "WIDE2-1"
Digipeaters: set PATH to "WIDE2-1" and UIDIGI to support "WIDE1-1" only

Beginner APRS:

Stephen Smith (WA8LMF) has written an excellent "essay" explaining the concepts of digipeating and PATH selection. If you're new to APRS (or even if you've been around the block (so to speak) a few times, you may find it an interesting read. See: APRS Digipeating and Path Selection 101.

Details:

The APRS RF network is becoming very congested, especially in the larger US cities. But due to a variety of problematic settings amongst various APRS users; most commonly due to a lack of clear understanding of the network; there are many cases of beacons being "broadcast" tremendous distances. I don't know about you, but some of the "documentation" concerning APRS settings has been a tad confusing, contradictory, or outdated.

As a service to local (Eastern Ontario) APRS users, I have set up this page to be a collection of tips that will allow you to hopefully set up your APRS rig to follow the most recent paradigm. The intent is to allow you to get your beacons out to the nearest IGate and/or other local users on RF.

Please take a moment to look over Bob Bruninga's recent page "Fixing the 144.39 APRS Network" at http://aprs.org/fix14439.html. It's quite detailed, so I will attempt to "water down" the recommendations to those most likely to apply to our area, and also toss in some pointers not specifically covered on this page. Eastern Ontario, and especially up towards Ottawa, is in the "medium-low" range of user density. While we don't have a major density problem, there are a few areas in town where a single beacon gets digipeated seven or eight times (if you're running a Kenwood rig, you'll know when that happens).

The current wisdom is to eliminate the duplication caused by RELAY digipeating, "WIDE"-only duplication, and excessively high "WIDEn-N" values. In most parts of North America, every digipeater is within two hops of an IGate, and digipeating beyond that is just noise. As "home" digipeaters get updated, "RELAY" should be replaced by "WIDE1-1", and "WIDE2-1" lets a wide-area digipeater handle your packet, but with only the one extra hop. Assuming digipeaters properly implement "WIDEn-N" processing and callsign substitution (unfortunately, not all in our area do), this can greatly reduce unnecessary RF traffic.

Home Settings:

Digipeater Settings (in addition to above):

Mobile Settings:

Comments welcome. Feel free to e-mail me at "my callsign @ gmail.com".
VE3BSM