In the last month, I’ve helped stand up 2 new digipeaters. One at the top of Columbia Heights in Longview and (soon to be) on Rainier hill across the river. Both of these machines have good elevation and line of sight, so in a default digipeater configuration of ^WIDE[12]-[12]$, they end up bringing in a fair bit of “out of area” traffic to the local RF channel that can clog up the works.

On the advice of NA7Q, to avoid this issue, I’ve added a new FILTER 0 0 ! d/* line to the digipeater configuration (as suggested by the manual) to only retransmit packets that were heard directly on the radio with no digi hops.

This will cause the digipeaters to improve the RF coverage of the network without over saturating the local RF channel with repeated traffic from nearby metro areas.

Note that the W7DG-5 station will still gate ALL traffic it hears, so it also adds value as a 2-way igate even if it’s not repeating everything.

I’m making the configuration changes today and will update this post with the results.

Complete configuration

ADEVICE plughw:1,0
CHANNEL 0
MYCALL W7DG-5
MODEM 1200
AGWPORT 8000
KISSPORT 8001
PBEACON delay=1  every=30   overlay=L  symbol="digi"  lat=46^10.97  long=122^57.50W  power=50  height=20  gain=4  comment="http://www.w7dg.org Local-only contact kf7hvm@0x26.net"
DIGIPEAT 0 0 ^WIDE[3-7]-[1-7]$|^TEST$ ^WIDE[12]-[12]$ TRACE
FILTER 0 0 ! d/*
IGSERVER noam.aprs2.net
IGLOGIN ...
IGTXVIA 0 WIDE1-1
IGFILTER IG 0 i/30
IGTXLIMIT 6 10