I have just spent what seems like several hours trying to find out why my weather station data sent by Cumulus to the APRS network vanishes without trace. I have tried using the wxnow.txt method of generating APRS weather objects in APRSISCE and that does work, but unfortunately it messes with the MYCALL setting in my Kenwood TM-D710 converse mode TNC. So I thought that I would avoid the problem by getting Cumulus to send the data to APRS-IS directly.
The data packets were being sent but they never showed up on aprs.fi. I produced debug logs for both Cumulus and APRSISCE. These showed the packets being sent. So where did they disappear to?
To cut a long story short, Cumulus was sending the data packet with a path of TCPXX*. This is listed as "deprecated" in the APRS spec but it is actually blocked by the APRS-IS network software. The CWOP (Citizens Weather Observer Program) which I believe runs on an older version of the software, is not so picky so no-one had encountered the problem before. Can you believe that I must be the first person to try sending weather data to the APRS network using the Cumulus software?
That's interesting, Julian!
ReplyDeleteI had used Cumulus to send APRS data. But not for 12 months or so, I guess. Perhaps the APRS-IS block has been put in place since then.
Tim
I had wondered why my APRS reports weren't going anywhere. Now I know :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks for that.
Andy, G8TQH