Greg,
I can't lay hands on the message right now, but some time into the spring last year I think that Tobi wrote that the auto system was in test mode, and implied or outright said that they would work on it in the future. To me that meant that if NO one was sending auto station data they'd have nothing to tweak or play with. In addition he speculated that the original stations in a less densely represented area would need a wide range of gains to hear far signals in areas where no closer stations provided good data. More than one comment here was that the farther the station is from the event, the more garbage and poorer quality signal is received.
Therefore as stations proliferate there will be less need for super high gain stations. But I submit for discussion that there may still be a need for variability in gain even when stations are close together.
The one thing that was unclear to me, at least, was what the vision of the developers for the future of the system, of which we are participants. Was it from Tobi's tangential discussion implied that they were going to have a new version of auto in place in the future? It would have been reassuring to those of use using Auto to have heard a statement saying he needed a few or a couple handfuls of stations sending auto signals. I think Mike has said that auto is not supported (at all? In test only?) and manual was the only way to go. Then why if there was no need for that feature, didn't it get switched off as an option?
I'm not being critical of the developers, since without their vision and unbelievably hard work none of us out here would have this fun system (and relatively low cost) to participate in. But when one gets two conflicting messages, in effect, it's hard to know what to do, and some of the good people here have chosen to run auto and some manual.
'Nuf said, but the BLUE announcement sort of lays this all to rest. There will need to be a new algorithm and system of server code to handle the old and the new, and maybe the issue of auto will be laid to rest once and for all when the curtain rises on the new era of stations and BO in general.
