I am in the process of developing an APRS bot which digests incoming APRS messages and processes them. OS3 APRS chat is used for the testing process. As per feedback from one of my beta testers, the capability of supporting utf-8 messages should be tested, too ( http://www.aprs.org/aprs12/utf-8.txt ) - which seems to be an obstacle for the OS3 APRS chat client.

Example: Whenever I submit a string such as

Höxter;de

via the OS3 APRS chat client, the string is received as

H..xter;de

As I wasn't sure whether this would just be misinterpreted UTF-8 content, I decided to hexdump the string in question and was able to verify that the string does indeed contain two 0x2e characters where the special character should be.

If I submit the same content via another IOS APRS app, everything looks fine and my program receives the proper content.

Examples: see attachments.

Interesting enough, receiving UTF-8 content in OS3 is no issue - everything gets displayed in a proper format. Give Hessu's UTF-8 bot a try: http://blog.aprs.fi/2009/12/magic-utf-8-support-weighted-callsigns.html - the OS3 can receive these UTF-8'ed messages without any issue. Now copy the received content to a new message and sent it to a different callsign. In my case, that call sign only receives 0x2e characters for every special character that was part of the message.

Is this a bug/known issue that UTF-8 content cannot be submitted via the OS3's APRS client - or have I made a mistake? The OS3 manual does not mention any restrictions wrt character encoding for the APRS chat.

Thanks
Joerg, DF1JSL