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APRS

The Automatic Packet Reporting System, APRS has been around is some shape or form since 1982. It is a tried and true situation awareness application of ham radio. The APRS-IS network is the common link between APRS gateways using the internet. Since Faraday modems connected to a computer use internet sockets to communicate with applications it is trivial to send data over the internet.

The APRS application is a core Faraday application provided by FaradayRF so that radio amateurs may leverage this heritage network with Faraday. Eventually we will provide an interconnected network for Faraday data. However, we're fans of what APRS has done to the hobby and are excited to be able to integrate with it.

What Does the APRS Application Do?

This application provides a socket link to APRS-IS servers and sends data from Faraday to show up on the APRS-IS system. This way, you may use services such as the excellent aprs.fi to view geospatial information. The current limitations include:

  • Data is only sent to APRS-IS and is not received from it
  • Only specific APRS Specification packet types relevant to Faraday have been implemented
  • Packets sent to APRS-IS are intended to not rebroadcast over RF (yet). However, this is not guaranteed and could end up on RF anyways.

Configuration

Before you can connect to the APRS-IS network you need to create an aprs.ini file with your callsign.

  1. Navigate to the Applications/APRS folder
  2. Create a copy of aprs.sample.ini and rename the new file aprs.ini
  3. Open aprs.ini in a text editor and update the requested information noted by REPLACEME

Configuring APRS consists of changing one parameters for basic use:CALLSIGN.

  • [APRSIS]: APRS-IS credentials section
  • CALLSIGN: APRS-IS login callsign

Passcode automatically generated

The CALLSIGN in aprs.ini is used to generate a passcode when properly configured with the operators callsign.

Running APRS

As a prerequisite, you must have the following programs running in the background while Faraday is connected to the computer:

  • Proxy
  • Telemetry

With these running simply run aprs.py and the application will startup. It continually loops through and queries Telemetry for new data from any recently heard station (default 5 minutes). The latest telemetry data from each active station is sent to APRS-IS once every minute by default.

Correctly Running APRS Application

APRS application running with fixed GPS location

The application running above is nominal and connected to a KB1LQC-1 Faraday radio through Proxy which doesn't have a GPS. Since GPS Fix is therefore zero APRS simply warns that the unit has a bad GPS Fix. However, since we know it's configured with a fixed location in Flash memory this can be disregarded.