APRS Common Bulletin Board for Situational Awareness 16 Jan 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------- WB4APR Ev Tupis noted: > APRS is billed as a situational awareness service, > yet... largely barren of situational awareness info... The original APRS concept for displaying this collection of situational information was the MAP display -and- the VIRTUAL BULLETIN/ANNOUNCEMENT BOARD. My previous message addressed the problem as a great under- utilization of OBJECTS to convey the situation. This message will address the lack of implementaiton in all follow-on clones of the COMMON VIRTUAL BULLETIN/ANNOUNCEMNET BOARD concept. Unfortunately, I don't think a single APRS follow-on clone properly implemented the VIRTUAL Bulletin board. Just like a MAP display was supposed to keep everyone informed of the POSITIONS of everything (and lots of objects), the BULLETIN BOARD was supposed to act like a BIG DISPLAY board that EVERYONE could see and they ALL SAW THE SAME THING. Think of a big board in the EOC, but now everyone could see the SAME board via APRS everywhere. BUT IT WAS THE SAME BOARD. The original APRS VIRTUAL BULLETIN board had 40 lines. This is not a "limitation" but a forced method of making users condense information to only what is immediately valuable, current and relevant. Think of the public boards in Train stations or Airports. In APRS, anyone can post to the board, can edit their lines or can kill their lines. The board is always sorted on the display. This way, the most important information was always on the display (the same to everyone) and since each source can edit his lines one line at a time, this drastically reduced channel load. Only a changed line had to be retransmitted. If the top 4 lines on the COMMON display board was maintiaing a list of capabilities at each shelter, then to change the second line of that display, an update required only ONE PACKET to re- transmit THAT line! The update was sorted and INSERTED where the old line was! The limitation of 40 lines was arbitrary but was INTENTIONAL to keep the board uncluttered and to make sure that EVERYONE was always seeing the most important and current information and all were seeing it in the same way! If new information came in that made the board go over 40 lines, then the oldest information was overwritten. But more often, the originator of an old post that was no longer valid, could simply OVERWRITE his old lines on the board with new information on the board at the same place. Again, ONLY THE 40 most important lines that were CURRENT would ever be on anyone's display. If you wanted to see a chronology of all bulletins, updates, changes etc, then you could look at the message log. Problem is, none of the follow-on APRS clones implemented the VIRTUAL bulletin board. They all just show bulletins as items in a sequential LOG. Thus, no one sees the same thing. There is nothing maintaining the currency of the information, there is no system for focusing on what is imporant and what is old, and there is no way of editing or updating information without sending the entire text and context over again plus retries. This is a total failure of these clones to understand the need for COMMON information diplays of situatinal information! The few clones that even considered the VIRTUAL bulletin board display rejected it as being too limited at 40 lines. They could provide a log display of hundreds or thousands of lines of bulletins... Well DUH, that is the worst way to present TIMELY, RELEVANT, IMPORTANT information. Humans cannot focus on huge lists of data, they need FOCAL points. This single VIRTUAL BULLETIN/ ANNOUNCEMNT display was supposed to filter out all the old, changed, and updated information and only display to everyone the MOST IMPORTANT and CURRENT 40 lines of info, that EVERYONE SAW everywhere. In APRSdos, all one had to do was look at the BULLETIN BOARD and see what has been posted. If something new has been posted since you last looked, you were alerted to "new bulletins" pending. This one screen gave him the full present, real-time situation (that everyone else was also seeing). With the all the missguided focus on the maps and just vehicle tracking of so many follow-on clones, this concept of a FIXED single community bulletin board display presenting the full relevant tactical situation has been completely lost to almost all users. This is another reason why the focus on APRS as a vehicle tracking system has caused people to no longer see APRS for its intended purpose of situational awareness. We need this 40 line VIRTUAL Bulletin Board added to all software that omitted it in their rush to vehicle tracking. I believe that an add- on has now been written for UIview. I hope everyone uses it. Using this add-on would be a requirement for participation in an event. An entire page in the APRS SPEC (p78) was dedicated to presenting this concept of DISPLAY and IMPLEMENTATION of a COMMON bulletin board display, yet it was easier for programmers to just display bulletins as they came in, and keep them in a sequencial log, than to present them as intended. Bummer for APRS... Don't get me started on what else has been glossed over in the rush to put ICONS on maps. APRS was a lot more.... Read about them: http://aprs.org/APRS-tactical.html Bob, WB4APR