[drats_users] Why GPS over GPS-A

[Dan Smith]

> On a recent trip from Seattle to the California Bay area, I attempted
> to get my IC-2820 to report my position. I believe that I did GPS
> down to California and GPS-A back up to Seattle with no success. I
> found a few things online that gave me enough info that I have since
> added an eight character for my call on all my radios (M for mobile
> and P for portable). Ideally I should have been able to find WT0F-M
> on the APRS servers, but no joy.

I don't think that a character in the eighth position is required for
the APRS gateway, but I could be wrong.  There's not much of that
activity around here.

> To the best of my understanding, the gateway administrator has to
> setup a script to catch the GPS beacons and report them to the
> APRS-IS servers. I just figured that most of the gateways were not
> configured to do so. It would be nice if I were just doing something
> wrong. 

Well, that's technically true, but it's part of the default set of
things that the US trust people ask you to do on your system before they
let you on the system.  It's certainly possible that either some gateway
admins either didn't set it up in the first place, or aren't monitoring
that component all the time to make sure it's still in place.

-- 
Dan Smith
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS