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ZL3AI > APRDIG 10.05.04 19:44l 266 Lines 11271 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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From: ZL3AI@ZL3VML.#80.NZL.OC
To : APRDIG@WW
Subject: RE: APRS Kenwood Radios
From: "Daron J. Wilson" <daron@wilson.org>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 10:35:30 -0700
X-Message-Number: 35
Personally I favor APRS over watching the grass grow, and one reason is
for our area we doing a fair amount with weather. There is so much more
than can be done, and as I learn more I'll try to do it. What won't
make progress is sitting on your thumb and demanding that the radio
manufacturers figure out (for you) what you should have and present it
to you. At which time you will likely complain that it is not what you
wanted, and it costs too much.
-------------------
Good point. I got to practice plotting the location of a peanut shell
on a 1:24000 topo by hand last weekend. I *really* want to put together
a tracker that'll give field teams four color-coded flagging buttons
that they can it when they find something, and have it store those
waypoints locally until it's sure they've been received at the command post.
Scott
N1VG
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Subject: UI-View Questions
From: Rick Stoneking <w2rds@arrl.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 08:58:36 -0400
X-Message-Number: 6
I am trying to find a map of the New Jersey area to use with UI-View (the
fee version) in order to evaluate it. All of the maps I have found so far
are either of the entire US or of the East coast - and I can find no way to
zoom in (is there a way). Can anyone point me to, or provide a map of NJ
that I can use? I am considering getting the 32 bit version, but would
like to be able to play with the freebie for a while first.
Is there a UI-View reflector? I could not find one on TAPR or QTH.com.
Thanks,
Rick
W2RDS
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Subject: RE: UI-View Questions
From: "Eric H. Christensen" <kf4otn@earthlink.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 09:42:00 -0400
X-Message-Number: 7
Rick,
There sure is a listserv specially for UI-View. Send an email to
ui-view-subscribe@yahoogroups.com to subscribe.
73s,
Eric KF4OTN
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Subject: Re: APRS Kenwood Radios
From: "Curt, WE7U" <archer@eskimo.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 09:55:24 -0700 (PDT)
X-Message-Number: 8
On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Herb Gerhardt wrote:
>Wimp, wimp, wimp. That is all that I got out of all those messages! Most
>of them seem as a total waste of everyone's time. I don't remember reading
>anything constructive all day!
Sorry you didn't see the utility of the QSO's. Several good issues
got discussed. They needed to be.
>Everyone is looking for the PERFECT APRS radio. Well it does not exist.
>The Kenwood D700 and D7A are the closest that presently exist. Why aren't
>you all attacking the other Radio Manufacturers who don't even support APRS!
Absolutely. Competition would make a big difference. I keep hearing
people say that the market isn't big enough, but Kenwood seems to be doing
ok. They've sold a lot of them. Whether sales were high enough to
overcome development costs and return a sufficient profit is not known to
us. I've got to assume that the other manufacturers are keeping an eye on
the quantities, trying to decide whether to enter that new (for them)
market.
--
Curt, WE7U archer at eskimo dot com
Arlington, WA, USA http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me: I picked the coordinate system!"
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Subject: Re: [ui-view] Ambiguity?
From: "Curt, WE7U" <archer@eskimo.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 10:08:54 -0700 (PDT)
X-Message-Number: 9
On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Spider wrote:
>From: "Curt, WE7U" <archer@eskimo.com>
>
>>>I see chopping off significant digits from a position as a way to
>>represent position ambiguity to be misleading.
>
>Yes, because it is not ambiguity, it's proximity. The location is not
>"anywhere within the surrounding whatever, it's in the middle.
>
>However, I think the way we are thinking about it is wrong...and Bob tried
>to explain it on the UI-View sig...and I finally got what he was trying to
>accomplish with it in APRSDos. I've just never seen APRSDos work. This is
>where screen shots would REALLY pay off!
Imagine a mobile driving along with ambiguity turned on, they end up with a
ellipse/rectangle around them, depending on the client viewing their path.
They'll cross an ambiguity boundary, then they'll flip to a new
ellipse/rectangle until they drive to the far border of that, then flip to
a new one again. Imagine driving across a bunch of dominoes, that's pretty
much what it'd look like.
So, instead of representing the (somewhat known) position of the station as
it comes from a GPS but with an ellipse around it (equal distance from the
symbol to the edge of the ellipse) which is what I would think of for
ambiguity, you end up inside rectangular zones but the station isn't at the
middle of the rectangular zone. The rectangular zone is created because of
the APRS method of dropping off significant digits to represent ambiuguity.
The station drives from one edge of one dominoe across into the next
dominoe.
The correct method would be to leave all of the digits intact, but have
another method of conveying the ambiguity in the packet, so that an ellipse
could be drawn around the object that would move with the object. The
station would remain represented in the middle of that ellipse, or perhaps
the symbol could be expanded or some other method used. You'd end up with
an incremental change in the position of the ellipse, instead of flipping
to a new ellipse/rectangle as you crossed boundaries, as the current APRS
spec requires us to do.
--
Curt, WE7U archer at eskimo dot com
Arlington, WA, USA http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me: I picked the coordinate system!"
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Subject: RE: Reprogramming the D700
From: "Curt, WE7U" <archer@eskimo.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 10:21:06 -0700 (PDT)
X-Message-Number: 10
On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Scott Miller wrote:
>So it's possible, yes, but not practical. Not unless Kenwood wants to hand
>over their source code. And that's the whole point behind the Open Source
>movement, is that the source code is available to anyone - you can see how
>it's built, and you can change it to suit your needs. I just don't expect
>to see commercial radio manufacturers embracing this model any time soon.
To dream a little, if they had:
Firmware upgrades for the TNC portion on a regular basis.
TNC supported a real KISS TNC function (1024+ characters).
An additional embedded processor that we could program
ourselves, documented well.
With this system, we could do darn near anything we wanted protocol-wise.
It'd be unstoppable, and I'd want one. Or two. Or three. We could add
our own Smart Beaconing, digipeating, OpenTrac protocol, etc.
Yea, it's dreaming at this point, but easily possible should one of the
radio manufacturer's choose to do it.
--
Curt, WE7U archer at eskimo dot com
Arlington, WA, USA http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me: I picked the coordinate system!"
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Subject: RE: Reprogramming the D700
From: "Scott Miller" <scott@opentrac.org>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 10:28:30 -0700
X-Message-Number: 11
>With this system, we could do darn near anything we wanted
>protocol-wise. It'd be unstoppable, and I'd want one. Or two. Or
>three. We could add our own Smart Beaconing, digipeating, OpenTrac
>protocol, etc.
>
>Yea, it's dreaming at this point, but easily possible should one of
>the radio manufacturer's choose to do it.
I'll second that. Any chance the manufacturers will have people at DCC that
will listen?
I think there might also be an issue of corporate culture. Opening up code
like this is something that most companies aren't used to doing - at least,
not without non-disclosure agreements and such.
But yeah, I'd buy a couple myself.
Scott
N1VG
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Subject: Re: APRS greater precision
From: "KC2MMi" <kc2mmi@verizon.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 13:56:48 -0400
X-Message-Number: 12
<Even Windows finally got rid of DOS compatibility.>
Actually, Windows up through Win98 was a DOS application. There was no
question of compatibilty, the computer was still running on DOS.
The newer versions of Windows (NT4, Windows2000 aka NT5, XP aka NT5.1) are
all WindowsNT products and none of them are DOS applications, because DOS is
inherently flawed in that it has no provision for multitasking or memory
management among different applications/users. Like APRS, DOS simply can't
do what the newer OSes can do, it can't support the features that newer
users with newer equipment consider standard.
However, NT runs a very nice DOS emulator, and NT5.1 runs extensive legacy
support for Win9x applications as well. XP provides full support for all
DOS applications that were "properly written". Many simply were not.
"APRS 3.0" could do the same thing, provide extensions but still support
the old standard for those users who want to use it. Of course, that would
require adding a digit in the APRS packet to indicate "APRS version #?" and
that would mean...another modification to APRS.
That's the APRS situation, in that not all of the hardware and software
really supports all of the APRS spec now, and there is no "compliance
certification" so the customers don't know if what they are getting should
actually be expected to work. There's no way for the products to know what
they are expected to deal with when they get data from each other.
Microsoft addressed that somewhat, with the Windows Logo Certification
program. APRS has nothing comparable. A single digit for version numbering
would be a start.
NT has made great changes. ISA devices and serial devices and 64K memory
chips are all obsolete--but, NT still supports them. It also happens to
support USB and FireWire and some ridiculous number like four petabytes of
hard drives, because people want to do more than they did ten years ago. I
still have one ten year old computer. I don't ask it to do much, and when I
network it to the NT boxes, it still works just fine alongside them. It just
won't ever do what they do, with what they have.
I'm glad Microsoft didn't say "We won't support new options for new
equipment, your old computer couldn't run it anyway." The new OS is too big
to run on my old computer. So what?
"Hardware is cheap". [Bill Gates, circa 1984, and yes, I disagreed with him
when I heard him say it. It wasn't so cheap, then. It is now.]
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