Re: [sarex] Why do so many people send ISS packet listing.. -- A solution?

[Steve Dimse <k4hg@xxxxxxxx>]

On 7/30/01 11:10 AM Delbert Matlock (delbert@matlock.com) wrote:

>Doesn't look like there is anything operating down in the AU/NZ area right 
>now.  In fact, the whole southern hemisphere looks pretty dead.
>
As is expressed on the ariss.net page, the lack of IGates has always been 
the biggest problem.

>Perhaps a lighter weight client would be helpful.  Something that acts 
>like a normal packet terminal, but also gates information out for 
>ARISS.net in the background.
>
That would be nice, any volunteers to write it?

>> With APRS, the focus is on the information itself, not the path, so the 
>> APRSIS does not track the receiving station. Still, the important part of 
>> this contact is the user getting heard by ARISS, and as long as the 
>> echoed packet is heard by at least one Internet Gateway, it will appear 
>> on the page. Knowning how many ground stations heard the echo and where 
>> they were located is not all that useful.
>
>Sorry, but I'd dispute the usefullness of ground station location.  After 
>making a couple of contacts through ISS, my interest moved towards seeing 
>how low on the horizon I could make contact and how far away I could hear 
>stations from.  For a while I was even sending reports directly to people 
>I heard on ISS to let them know how far away they were heard.
>
findu.com is not set up to do this sort of propagation study. The system 
works hard to eliminate duplicate packets, (600,000 a day is enough, 
without removing dups it would be triple that), but for the sort of thing 
you are envisioning you would need to save the dups, as well as 
identifying the original station.

>Since ISS is probably the easiest, and highest power, bird to hit, it's 
>going to draw more beginners (like myself).  Letting those people know 
>just how far away they were heard could get them interested in pursuing 
>the harder to contact sats.
>
To a naive user, I suppose this has gee-whiz appeal, but if you stop and 
think about it, the path length to hear your next-door neighbor is pretty 
much the same as someone across the country. Indeed, even if you had the 
location of the receiving station, you still can't calculate the path 
length without knowing the position of the ISS at the moment it digied 
the packet.

I agree that the gee-whiz factor is important in drawing in new hams, but 
I think ariss.net does a pretty good job of that now. Still, if someone 
wanted to write and maintain the more capable system, I'd be glad to help 
get the existing IGates converted over to the new software, and to 
interface it to findu.com so that the pages at ariss.net could continue 
to receive their data.

Steve K4HG
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