[amsat-bb] AmSat Ombudsman

[Patrick STODDARD (WD9EWK/VA7EWK)]

Robert,

The first part of your e-mail appears to refer to an allegation Clint
Bradford K6LCS recently posted on this mailing list, and on other
mailing lists and forums. As I said on the QRZ satellite forum
yesterday, Clint's allegations about me and that web site are false.

In the few times I have publicly criticized Clint in recent years, I
did so with my name attached to what I posted, as I did on the eHam
satellite forum in 2016:

https://www.eham.net/community/smf/index.php?topic=108627.15

This exchange led to a letter sent by Clint to AMSAT and me, which
threatened AMSAT with legal action. I am not aware of AMSAT taking
actions in response to his letter, and - based on AMSAT's 2016 IRS tax
return - AMSAT did not spend any monies on legal expenses that year.

As for the other part of your e-mail, the "some reason" packets from
your APRS Internet gateway stations no longer appear on the ariss.net
web site, you and I had a conversation about that. One of your APRS
gateways was rewriting packets received from the ISS packet digipeater,
adding a tagline promoting the web site for your Space Communicator
Club. The packets containing that tagline were injected into the APRS
Internet System (APRS-IS), violating policies of that system. Those
packets also cluttered the listing of packets recently heard from the
ISS on the ariss.net web site. You told me at that time you were
testing a function on one of your gateways to put that tagline onto
packets, something that had been happening over the period of a few
days. This included the 20-minute period you mentioned, when one of
your gateways continued to send packets to the APRS-IS system after
the ISS had moved away from North America.

As you stated, I contacted Steve Dimse K4HG. Steve owns the ariss.net
and findu.com web sites, useful for displaying information on APRS
packets. I asked Steve about the packets from your gateway that were
showing up on his ariss.net web site. Steve reminded me of the APRS-IS
policies regarding packets being submitted to that system. Other than
appending the call sign of the gateway that received the packet to the
packet path, no other modifications are supposed to be made to packets
sent to the APRS-IS system. I mentioned that to you in a separate
e-mail, even citing the policies as published on the aprs-is.net web
site. I am aware that you and Steve also had an e-mail discussion about
this around the same time.

After those e-mail exchanges, I heard from you that packets from your
gateways would not appear on the ariss.net site. This appears to be an
issue between you and Steve, as Steve maintains the ariss.net web site.
I have no control over that, and - as far as I know - neither does
AMSAT. Have you reached out to Steve recently?

73.





Patrick Stoddard, WD9EWK/VA7EWK
http://www.wd9ewk.net/
Twitter: @WD9EWK or http://twitter.com/WD9EWK