[amsat-bb] Re: APRS on Bernuda and Atlantic

[Bob Bruninga]

> Ah, but an APRS satellite would be one 
> of those silly pointless FM beepsats.  

APRS has had an HT global text-messaging tool before the cell phone craze
brought it to everyone. 

Since 1998, Ham radio has had an HT (the D7) that can text-message any other
APRS HT or mobile on the planet in real time by only knowing the
receipient's callsign.  This is not email, it is live texting HT-to-HT
anywhere, anytime.

Too bad most of ham radio still has never even tried it and criticize it
when most of billions of people on the planet now embrace texting as a
valuable human-to-human communications tool.

We've had HT texting for over a decade.  Well ahead of consumers... yet we
squander it away rather than learn to use it.  

APRS was never primarioy about GPS tracking.  It was first a human-to-human
work-everywhere comm link on a single national channel.  Too many people got
distracted by the maps, and never even tried to communicate with it.

Bob, WB4APR