A word about Call Signs...

Yesterday, someone on one of the APRS bulletin boards was complaining about Aircraft owners using their November numbers as a callsign. This is perfectly legal and a sound practice, but the gentleman he used as an example was not sending his call sign at all (al least over APRS-I suppose he could have hooked up a paddle to his radio and sent station ID in morse code....) Just a word to the wise, please make sure that you add your call sign to the comment field. The old gys are watching, and some of them don't take too kindly to these new-fangled airplanes and radios without tubes in 'em!

Allen
VHS

VHS said:

Yesterday, someone on one of the APRS bulletin boards was complaining about Aircraft owners using their November numbers as a callsign. This is perfectly legal and a sound practice, but the gentleman he used as an example was not sending his call sign at all (al least over APRS-I suppose he could have hooked up a paddle to his radio and sent station ID in morse code....) Just a word to the wise, please make sure that you add your call sign to the comment field. The old gys are watching, and some of them don't take too kindly to these new-fangled airplanes and radios without tubes in 'em!

Allen
VHS

Click to expand...

Well, the FCC rules are very clear - you must ID with your amateur radio callsign. I would no more use my airplane's tail number as my ID than I would use my ham callsign to announce my location in the pattern.

TODR

Disclaimer: I own no tubes except the kind that go in tires.

Call signs

You are very correct in that the FCC issued call sign must be used to identify your station. This does not preclude using a "tactical call sign" as an alias, as long as your actual call sign is used for station ID.

Allen
VHS

the_other_dougreeves said:

Well, the FCC rules are very clear - you must ID with your amateur radio callsign. I would no more use my airplane's tail number as my ID than I would use my ham callsign to announce my location in the pattern.

TODR

Disclaimer: I own no tubes except the kind that go in tires.

Click to expand...

Doug, not sure if you are familiar or not with the data format our APRS trackers are sending, but just to clear up any confusion please be advised there are two fields in the packet stream wherein a call sign can be inserted.

What many of us are sending is our N-number in the "call sign" field so that is what will appear on the tracking maps. After all, we are most interested in tracking our planes.

However, our FCC call sign is transmitted in the "Status" comments field and that satisfies the FCC requirement to identify the station at least every ten minutes. The "Status" text is visible to anyone who looks at the data stream from the tracker. I have my tracker configured to send the FCC call sign every fourth packet which would be a minimum of two ID's every ten minutes and many more ID's per ten minutes when Smartbeaconing kicks in. By not sending the FCC call sign every packet we can avoid sending packets that are longer than necessary and thereby help ease frequency congestion a bit.



Apparently the tracker Allen referenced wasn't sending the FCC call sign at any time. That is a no-no.

(The image above is a screenshot of one of my early configs. I'm now using the WIDE2-1 path.)