"Charles Brabham" wrote

APRS fits TAPR's ideal of a "killer application" perfectly - It
kills off
all interest in the hobby. The more TNC's they can talk hams into
tying up
so they can report thier house's position on the internet, the less
will be
used for communicating as hams or doing anything else that may be
interesting or useful.

Charles, that may be to case in the US, but here in England, it was
the RSGB that killed off packet radio.

The Radio Society of GB had this odd idea that reducing the channel
spacing was needed because the commercial radio used closer channel
spacing than ham radio.

So now instead of 77 (of 80) channels mostly unused we have 158 (of
160) channels mostly unused.

Because a narrow channel requires less deviation, we all had to reduce
our deviation. This reduced the range of signals, such that the one
to one live activity that we enjoyed stopped within a very short time
as our signals could not be heard.

At least APRS has increased activity on VHF here. However I agree
that internet connections would appear to be more important for some
folk.

Reg, G4ENS