Deprecated TCPXX construct

Hi all,

Last christmas I gave my wife a nice FineOffset WH1090 weather station. Since I am a licensed radio amateur and a little bit jealous of my wife’s gift I wanted to interface the weather station to APRS ! Great cumulus can do it !
I own an APRSIS passcode.
Being into APRS since several years now I configured cumulus to use euro.aprs2.net
euro.aprs2.net is a round robin DNS for europe. The actual server you get connected to depends on hour of day.

Unfortunately depending on the server which you get connected to your data is not pushed to the APRS-IS system.
After analysing debug.log I think I nailed the issue. The generated APRS data has TCPXX in the path

F4FXL-6>APRS,TCPXX*:@200627z4849.50N/00736.27E_087/003g017t047r000p000P000h78b10141eCumulusFO

TCPXX was primarily meant for station sending data to APRS without having being autheticated. But TCPXX has been deprecated http://www.aprs-is.net/q.aspx ! Some APRS servers just drop such data, others are clever to check if the sending station has been verified and change it to TCPIP. It seems like cwop.aprs.net does this, but for some reasons I do not see my packets in the “whole” APRS-IS system this is why I would like to use euro.aprs2.net

A workaround for now is to not use the DNS round robin but use a server which is smart enough to check if I am a verified user.

I do not know why Cumulus uses the outdated TCPXX construct, maybe it is because of some CWOP requirement, no clue.
If this is the case the workflow to get over this is quite straight forward.
Login to the APRS server
send login details
check the server response if it contains the word “verified”
if it contains verified use TCPIP instead of TCPXX

Thank you for reading and for the good software ! :slight_smile:

This is not unique to Cumulus, WD will need this change too.

  • Jim

There’s been a lengthy discussion about this on the newsgroup. Software that sends TCPXX will no longer pass muster on the new v4 server software. Apparently only a couple servers are running this new version currently.

WD does not send TCPXX
it sends TCPIP