2 ENJOYING APRS (by BOB BRUNINGA, WB4APR)
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2.7 Texting
But still, most non APRS ham radio operators just did not see any advantages beyond the
maps. My frustration with the growing lack of live human content in APRS continued to
fester to the breaking point at a 2006 ARRL Special Meeting at Dayton on the lack of youth
in ham radio.
The gathered fathers of ARRL lamented: “Ham radio was missing the youth”. They were
“too busy texting on their cell phones” and “ham radio had nothing similar to offer”. I was
flabbergasted. Ham radio had had a wireless texting/email handheld device for nearly a
decade since 1998 in the form of the handheld KENWOOD APRS TH-D7 A/E and yet even
the amateur radio leadership was not aware of these capabilities and had never tried it.
This was frustrating. While the older hams were shunning real-time APRS digital text
communications with APRS, and handheld Photo-sharing using the KENWOOD SSTV
handheld, the kids of the world were just getting going with texting and Photo-sharing then
Twitter on every conceivable handheld device or exchanging handheld pictures with the
VC-H1.
Yet the entrenched amateur radio old timers could not see any value to APRS texting and
emailing on a keypad.
As mentioned in the above illustration, there are more than 26 different text systems being
used in Amateur Radio (which do not talk to each other) as suggested in the image above.
Fortunately, today just about every smartphone and handheld does have an application for
APRS message compatibility. Our goal in APRS is to seamlessly integrate these disjointed
systems so that a message-to-callsign from any device gets delivered to the callsign owner
on any device that is currently turned on. Many of these systems are already connected by
APRS and the APRS-Internet system (APRS-IS).
Refer to http://aprs.org/aprs-messaging.html
