Kenwood TH-D72A/E User Manual page 15

2 HOW YOU ENJOY APRS WITH TH-D72A/E (WRITTEN BY BOB BRUNINGA, WB4APR)
Texting
But still most non APRS ham radio operators just did not find any advantages beyond the maps. My
frustration with the growing lack of live human content in APRS continued to fester to the breaking
point at a 2006 ARRL Special Meeting at Dayton on the lack of youth in ham radio. The gathered
fathers of ARRL lamented: "Ham radio was missing the youth. They were "too busy texting on their
cell phones" and ham radio had nothing similar to offer". I was incensed. Ham radio had had
wireless hand-held texting and email for nearly a decade in the form of the handheld Kenwood APRS
TH-D7A/E and yet even the amateur radio leadership was not aware and had never tried it. This was
frustrating. The reason was because while the hams were shunning real-time APRS digital text
communications, the kids of the world were just getting going with texting and then Twitter on every
conceivable handheld device. Yet the entrenched amateur radio old timers could not see any value
to APRS texting and emailing on a keypad.
As mentioned in the above illustration, there are more than 26 different text systems available.
I counted over 26 different texting systems in ham radio as suggested in the image above.
Fortunately, today just about every smartphone and handheld has an application for APRS message
compatibility. Our goal in APRS is to seamlessly integrate these disjointed systems so that a
message-to-callsign from any device gets delivered to the callsign owner on any device that is
currently turned on. Many of these systems are already connected by APRS and the APRS-Internet
system (APRS-IS).
Refer to: http://aprs.org/aprs-messaging.html
TH-D72A/E 7
CONTENTS