January 6, 2006
Bad Usage of RELAY
On the Web Server you can retrieve a list of stations using the RELAY digi alias in a wrong way.
How does a station qualify for being listed there?
As you might know, the RELAY alias should be used as the first hop only in any source routing digi path. Fixed stations that can directly access a WIDE digi should not use RELAY at all and leave it’s use to mobile and portable stations only.
Examples for proper use of RELAY:
- RELAY
- RELAY,WIDE
- RELAY,WIDE2-2
- RELAY,TRACE2-2
Examples for bad usage of RELAY:
- RELAY,RELAY,WIDE
- TRACE7-7,RELAY
- RELAY,TRACE5-5,RELAY
- WIDE4-4,RELAY
The list contains all stations that have used RELAY as their non-first digipeater in a source routing path, within the last 24 hours. If you would like to see some real life examples, please click here and see some more “creative ideas” like the examples above.
BTW: The long term goal is to reduce the size of this list to zero.
December 31, 2005
Digipeater Hop Limit
For our APRS digipeater on 144.800MHz, the maximum hop count is limited to 4 hops at all. This means that all source routing packets with 4 or less hops are digipeated, however packets with more than 4 digipeaters in their path are not digipeated at all, even if DB0ANF is the first digi in the chain.
Examples of packet paths that are digipeated (4 or less hops):
- RELAY,WIDE
- RELAY,WIDE3-3
- RELAY,TRACE3-3
- WIDE2-2
- WIDE4-1
Examples of packet paths that are not digipeated at all (more than 4 hops):
- RELAY,WIDE4-4
- WIDE7-7
- TRACE6-6
- RELAY,WIDE,WIDE,TRACE7-7
- RELAY,WIDE4-1
In case of any questions you can contact us
We hope that with the above limits we can help to calm down 144.800MHz a little. In our area, with two or three digis you will be visible within a >200km area. If you would like to know why more hops harm the APRS RF network, please read this article from Bob Bruninga, WB4APR.
If you would like to see some bad examples from today’s 144.800MHz network, you can find them here.