By Bob Bruninga, WB4APR
We finished the Appalachian Golden Packet (ATGP) event with 15 hops to Maine and 14 hops back to Georgia.
We think we can increase throughput 20x or more for 2020 by totally changing our beacon plan, messaging plan and getting the 2X benefit of 9600 baud.
This means we would like to see extension of the network perpendicular to the chain such as these mountains: Huntsville, AL, Lookout Mountain, TN, Stone Mountain, GA, Ridge South of Morganton, NC, etc. And so forth up to Maine.
Desired locations are high places on the order of a hundred miles away from the ATGP backbone stations that can see one of the ATGP stations This allows for a much bigger network during the event, but still keeping paths linear and avoiding the NxN explosion of packets.
We need to begin to find people to locate and man these additional sites. Please do not waste time on a mountain idea unless it can really be very far and perpendicular from the ATGP chain and always best if it is across valleys. Do path-tracing homework first before just throwing out ideas.
You can see the ATGP chain on this page: http://aprs.org/at-golden-packet.html
