On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 2:45 PM, usna71<[email protected]> wrote:
> Ok, I am really confused. Are you saying that if my tracker has an outgoing > path of WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and is heard directly by a high digi (WIDE2) then > it will not be repeated? No, that is not correct. WIDE area digipeaters will respond to any value in the WIDEn-N (unless set to trap large N values). The usual settings in a KPC-3+ allow it to digipeat on WIDE3-3, WIDE3-2, WIDE3-1, WIDE2-2, WIDE2-1, and WIDE1-1. Generally the unit is configured to trap WIDE4-4, WIDE5-5, WIDE6-6, and WIDE7-7 to keep people from using abusively long paths. All digipeaters should respond to WIDE1-1, but home fill-in stations should ONLY respond to WIDE1-1. If you are within range of a high digi, using a path of WIDE1-1, it should digipeat you. The next high digipeater will act upon the WIDE2-1 path. If you are out of range of a high digi, but near a home fill-in digipeater using a path of WIDE1-1, it will boost you into the main digipeaters, which will act upon the WIDE2-1. If you are near a home digipeater, and in range of a high digipeater, both digis will act upon the WIDE1-1, where the next digipeater will act upon the WIDE2-1. > Likewise, if I use a path such as KB1MOV,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 > with the goal of trapping my local movements into my home > digi/iGATE (KB1MOV) it would not work out of area because > KB1MOV had not been used up first? Not likewise, since your first supposition was wrong, but you are correct, your first hop would have to be through KB1MOV. This is similar to what happens to people who still have RELAY in their outgoing path. If they stay in an area that still supports RELAY, everything works fine, but when they go on the road, they only show up when they get within simplex range of an i-gate. They may be asking for 3 hops with a path such as RELAY,WIDE2-2, but since no one is supposed to support RELAY any longer, the only time they get i-gated is when they get close enough to an i-gate to be heard direct. Using a specific station such as KB1MOV as you first hop would be equivalent to using a zero hop path when you are out of range of your home station. > Separate question. On the wiki page for digipeater setup it shows the > example of WIDE > Is this in error and should it show WIDE1 and WIDE2? To be truthful, I have not delved into this deeply enough to answer all your questions. I know that the way Scott implemented this is not equivalent to the way Kantronics did it. I have not attacked an OT2 enough to know the exact idiosyncracies of the beast. When you enter an alias it makes it available to be used as an n-N type alias. It creates a wildcard space after the alias, and the hop limit limits the maximum value that the -N variable can have. So when you enter WIDE into the alias with a hop limit of 1, the unit will act upon any value of "n", as long as the value of "N" is 1. That's why it works on WIDE7-1, WIDE 6-1, WIDE5-1, WIDE4-1, WIDE3-1, and WIDE2-1 as well as what would be expected, WIDE1-1. By explicitly using an alias of WIDE1, and a hop limit of 1, it appears that the unit will only then act upon WIDE1-1, and no other values of "n" as above. Extrapolating from this, one would infer that using settings of WIDE1 hop limit 1, WIDE2 hop limit 2, and WIDE3 hop limit 3 would configure the unit to only act upon WIDE3-3 and lower paths and keep paths such as WIDE5-2 from being acted upon. > In the description would it be correct to say that WIDE1 is a > surrogate for a local fill-in digi Well, a digipeater that responds only to WIDE1-1 would be a fill-in digipeater... not sure I would call it a surrogate. > and WIDE2 means a high digi covering a wide area? A fill-in digipeater should not respond to WIDE2-2, full blown high digipeaters would respond to WIDEn-N values over 1 up to the local maximum supported. Generally 2 or 3 hops maximum. > The numbers really have no function. Instead of WIDE1-1 could we say FILL-1 > and instead of WIDE2-1 could we say HIGH-1 to the same effect? The numbers do have a function... specifically the last number. The first number is basically a place holder. You can use an outgoing path of WIDE7-1 or a path of WIDE7-1 which would generally get you one hop. However if my supposition above is accurate, setting an OT2 with the WIDE1, WIDE2, and WIDE3 aliases and associated hop limits would keep one from using an out of the ordinary path such as those I just listed. Generally the custom is to set n and N to the same value, such as WIDE2-2 or WIDE1-1. > Or is there something else I am missing? Well, you're kind of on the right track. It's really pretty simple once you figure out the concept. It's only computer instructions, and computers only do what you tell them to. The difficulty here is that we have two different implementations of the same concept, which gives up slightly different results. The Kantronics implementation is very straight forward on how it works. Scott's implementation has a few little quirks, because of the way he wrote the software. It also has a few extra features such as hop limits, and preemption which throw some curves at a newbie. If you can get the general concept down then it's just a little bit more work to figure out the curves we throw at you. James VE6SRV
