The position line was one string template, and it broke four rules at once.
No path. The specification says a client-originated packet carries TCPIP* in the
path, "nothing more or less", and there was none - `CALL>APRS:=...` went out bare.
No position meant 0,0. When the station QTH was unset and no GPS fix was available,
`lat ?: 0.0` put the operator at 0 degrees north, 0 degrees east - a point in the
Gulf of Guinea - on the global network, under their own callsign. There is no honest
default for "nowhere", so AprsBeacon refuses instead and the reporter says why. A
genuine 0,0 fix is still legal and still sent; the refusal is about absence.
No comment sanitising. A line break typed into the status field ended the packet and
started a second one from the remaining text, which an operator could trigger by
pressing return. Measured: the old builder emitted two lines from one call, the second
impersonating whatever callsign the text contained. Only printable ASCII survives now.
No length cap. A 600-character status produced a 636-byte line against a 512-byte
limit including CRLF. The comment is trimmed to whatever room is left after the
header and the coordinates, bounded also by the format's own 43-character limit.
Symbol handling was whatever character the operator typed first, including one that
breaks the fixed-width parse. It now accepts only what the specification allows -
the two table selectors and overlay characters - and falls back to the primary table.
aprs.fi names symbol misconfiguration as the most common reason a station never
appears on the map, so this is not cosmetic.
Separately, beaconing stopped whenever the screen locked. The interval was a coroutine
delay inside the reporter, and Doze suspends network access and ignores wake locks even
for a foreground service: the timer fired on schedule and then could not reach the
network, while the notification went on claiming the service was running. The service
now books each beacon with setExactAndAllowWhileIdle, which is the only scheduling that
survives Doze, and reschedules after each tick so a changed interval applies at once.
If the operator has revoked exact alarms it falls back to an inexact one, which beacons
late rather than not at all.
The foreground service type changes from dataSync to location. dataSync is capped at
six hours in any 24-hour window on recent Android and then stopped by the system, which
would silently end a beacon meant to run all day; the service reads the station position
and falls back to GPS, so location describes what it actually does.
The interval floor becomes five minutes rather than one. This station is fixed or
walking, and APRS-IS etiquette is to beacon no more often than the position changes.
The packet builder moves to core:domain as pure logic, so all of this is testable
without a socket - including that a comma-decimal locale cannot corrupt the coordinates,
which nothing covered before.
mckero
2ff8643988