Per chance, have you ever heard a position report from the digipeater itself, about the digipeater itself? There is a concept in APRS called vicinity plotting, where the location of a station that hasn't yet reported its own position is estimated from the position of the stations first relayed by that digipeater (for digipeaters) or the position of the first relaying digipeater (for originating stations).

In fact, in my area, there are several "stealth" digipeaters that never send position beacons, but only meet their government-mandated identification requirements by inserting their callsign-SSID into the digipeat path (UITRACE), so vicinity plotting is the only way to locate the digipeaters (other than true RF direction-finding or asking the digipeater owner).

Just out of curiosity, what program or website are you using to see the digipeater's location? Presumably, it's one that supports vicinity plotting.

Andrew, KA2DDO

author of YAAC (which does support vicinity plotting)

Yes I am hearing positions from the digi itself as it transmits (rfonly) its own position every 30 minutes. I built the digi on the mountain top and I have a test installation where I test changes, most of the time with the test radio on tx only. I monitor the test digi's Direwolf console log using PuTTY connected by a LAN cable from my laptop.

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Another digi prepared by me is installed 150 kms away from me in the other direction to the first. I need to be able to pass igate messages from an email server to the 2nd digi, which whilst it can hear my igate most of the time, I want the nearby mountain-top digi to digipeat the messages in case the distant one didn't hear my igate for whatever reason. Another igate is close enough to the 2nd digi for direct contact providing that igate is operational at the time, but of late it hasn't been particularly reliable and a backup path is very useful. These digis generate email requests for telemetry alerts such as low battery voltage so must respond appropriately to email server messages to avoid being banned.?

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I deleted the my original post because I had an easy solution which was to increase my allowed range and I didn't want to spend the time at the time sorting out exactly what was happening, but probably should have instead just added a comment then got back to it later.

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Graeme VK2HFG

The location of objects created by a station is presumably erroneously used to update the location in the heard table for the station, as seen when using the debug option -d m

This causes an incorrect distance calculation when determing whether packets received from the server for the station should be sent to RF.

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Heard table entry preceding a packet for an object being heard:

VK2RBE-1 ? ?4 ? 0 ? 0 ? ? 0:02 ? ? - ? ?-35.05 ?147.56 ?0

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then a packet for one of the objects is heard:

VK2RBE-1 audio level = 56(10/11) ? ?||||_____
[0.1 15:00:35] VK2RBE-1>APDW17,RFONLY:;438.025 ?*111111z3507.95S/14722.33ErT091 -500 Wagga linked rptr
mheard_save_rf: VK2RBE-1 0 - update time, was 0 hops 180 seconds ago.
callsign ?cnt chan hops ? ?RF ? ? ?IS ? ?lat ? ? long ?msp
VK2RBE-1 ? ?5 ? 0 ? 0 ? ? 0:00 ? ? - ? ?-35.13 ?147.37 ?0

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Graeme VK2HFG

A 1.7 development version is in use.? I'll test on 1.7 Release to see if there's any change.

Hmm, already running 1.7 release on my tx-igate.