OK I’ll look into that, but of course the LNA/SDR plug in after power up is a no go for the Alpha Lantern as it would require disassemble every time - - 10 screws remember!!.
Getting back to viewing APRS files in the Skylark APRS Viewer, after a day of downloading files, I still have no content in the Viewer when I open it. I didn’t see any messages in my System Messages file.
Looking at @wsombeck’s Amateur Radio tab,he’s getting them
but I’m not. Ken
OK I’ll look into that, but of course the LNA/SDR plug in after power up is a no go for the Alpha Lantern as it would require disassemble every time - - 10 screws remember!!.
Ahh… that’s true Ken 
just a quickie - there has been no APRS data delivered on Alphasat since15:06 on the 19th Jan ( now 07:514 on the 20th)
i have been making a bit of a mess on the carousels for the past 30 hours or so. everything is out of whack. The mess might continue today as well. I will rebuild the carousel from scratch tomorrow, and at that time things should again be back to normal.
Thanks for the alert!
you are allowed to make a mess of it … It is under sooo much flux!
Keep up the good work
Ha. I remember when I made a mess of things last month–but just by being lazy about some of the file uploads.
LOL!
Well the APRS is now only seeing the ISS and not “OUTNET” key words ( as far as I can make out!)
I was looking at this subject and thought I would just throw this in. I was checking aprs packets periodically on Outernet system last Saturday I think it was, and I saw a packet sent by the original inventor of aprs,so I guess Bob is looking at how this all works. Perhaps he will get on the forum and provide some ideas. As far as the other post on uses for aprs on Outernet, there is a particular symbol that can be used in the packet data that will designate the beacon as an emergency beacon on the entire system. It causes various aprs capable equipment to sound an alarm or give some sort of notification to everyone receiving it that an emergency has transpired ( tsunami, earthquake, etc). Might be something to look at using here?
What is that symbol?
There isn’t a symbol for “emergency beacon”. MIC-E is one of the compressed APRS formats has 3 bits used for a status message. Status message 7 is defined as “emergency”.
MIC-E was designed to be carried as a brief data burst at the end of transmission on a regular voice channel. It is rarely ever used in this manner. The advantage is that the shorter packets have a better chance of getting through a congested channel. Unfortunately, the format is difficult to decode.
Here is a MIC-E packet relayed via the ISS this morning:
KK6CUS-11>SSTYSR,RS0ISS,qAR,KI6WJP-4:`.\u!?hK]*
The first 3 bytes of the AX.25 “tocall” field SSTYSR are shifted left one bit and the high bits are inverted and combined to form the 3 status message bits.
S = 0x53 = 01010011
S = 0x53 = 01010011
T = 0x54 = 01010100
Shifting left and inverting the high bits yields a status message of “000” which is defined as “Off Duty”.
Unfortunately the emergency status is nearly always a false alarm caused by somebody who hasn’t read their radio manual. This leads to people ignoring the alarms. The suggested method to use a text message along with the emergency status to describe the nature of the emergency.
For non MIC-E formats the following emergency codes have been proposed for APRS V1.2
!ALARM!
!ALERT!
!WARNING!
!WXALARM!
!EM!
These appear in plain text in the APRS comment field and are intended to cause a flash or beep on receipt. This has already been implemented XASTIR and APRS-SA, perhaps others.
Personally, I find that the short MIC-E format does not yield that much of a benefit, and makes it impossible to interpret the data manually.
for ARPS iGate ham enthusiasts: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/a-pre-built-raspberry-pi-image-for-using-an-rtl-sdr-as-an-aprs-rx-igate/
I generally send Outernet a scheduled hourly beacon using an APRS server.
However the last time I saw any APRS download was at 0255.
Richard
ke7krf
I am glad you posted this, I was going through the same process now. I noticed that most of the entries seemed to be simply people who were hitting the ISS with their APRS packets, but not all of them. Now I see why some appeared to be somewhat random, it is the “OUTNET” designation that I was missing. I will have to try this!
Thanks!
@dschre I saw that I started getting APRS again this afternoon so I tried the above method sending to APOUT and including “OUTNET” and it may have been a timing thing but it was almost instant going out via my APRSDroid Client via TCP and then coming down from the SAT to my APRS Viewer app in Skylark, pretty cool! You may try it now. I was seeing the same outage as you earlier.
I noticed it started downloading again and I restarted my beacon.
A question maybe you could help answer. It is my understanding that any APRS packet must at some point be sent as RF so am wondering if using an APRS server to send to OUTNET obeys that protocol. I don’t have access in my rural area to a repeater unless I put up a substantial antenna, which I don’t really intend to do.
73
Richard
ke7krf
Here is the source of my question above:
“It MUST be assumed that every packet on APRS-IS will be gated to or was gated from RF.
This means that beacon rates, packet contents, etc. MUST be considered to be acceptable for RF.”
I am new at this APRS mode so not sure how to interpret the above statement.
Richard
Ricard, (@dschre)
I am not an APRS expert either but I am not aware that there is a requirement to go RF. In the case of my test you should be able to see several messages from me:
K0DFS>APDR13,TCPIP*,qAS,K0DFS-10::APOUT :OUTNET Message test!{1
K0DFS>APDR13,TCPIP*,qAS,K0DFS-10::APOUT :OUTNET Hello from K0DFS{2
Both of these were sent from my phone using the TCP protocol to connect to the “euro.aprs2.net”. Although I suppose technically they did start their journey via RF (because I sent it out my LTE data connection) the APRS system would only recognize these as originating via the Internet. For some reason when I send this way to the Euro Tier 2 I am not seeing a destination, I don’t quite get that. I also am not sure why everything is to APDR13, I will have to figure that out too. Anyway APDR13 may have transmitted these, but I don’t think it was necessary to get the messages out.
After these I switched to the North America Tier 2 server and those messages look a bit different, but they are still TCP the whole way at least until the sat uplink/downlink which I assume is some scripting magic done somewhere by outernet. They look like this:
K0DFS>APDR13,TCPIP*,qAC,T2CAEAST::APOUT :OUTNET Hello via NOAM Tier 2{3
K0DFS>APDR13,TCPIP*,qAC,T2CAEAST::KE7KRF :Hello Richard! de K0DFS via OUTNET{1
Note that the first one is the same as my others except now it went to North American Tier 2 server and this time you even see a route entry for “T2CAEAST” Tier 2 California East I think. So this one was also still TCP only. I can try to send one via VHF later if I get a chance. BTW that last one as you can see was directed right at you vs. sending to the “APOUT” which if I understand correctly is just a junk destination. Fun!
I also notice that most of my other messages have re-transmitted I assume because APOUT does not give any acknowledgement. I don’t think my message to you re-transmitted so I am wondering if that means your client received it?
Thanks for all of the information and helping clarify the use of an APRS server. Maybe someday down the road I’ll figure APRS out, but probably not until I start transmitting. The article in this thread about using a Raspberry Pi as a gateway got my attention. Yet another use for the RPi. Today I created an NTP timeserver on one of my RPi’s for the household – the clock in my laptop is notoriously slow, and the Windows time servers usually time out. I need accurate time for WSPR monitoring
Actually I was alerted to your message from the pop-up window in UI-view32, the APRS client running on my laptop and then went to Skylark and noticed the downloads are back in business.
Will be sending you a message via OUTNET shortly
Richard
ke7krf
Here is one to look over @dschre! It should be on your outernet feed too.
K0DFS>APDR13,WIDE1-1*,qAR,N0PTL::KE7KRF :This time sending VHF via OUTNET{2
Samsung S6 → Bluetooth TNC → UV-5R → local digipeaters → To you! You can see in this case it looks like I hit “N0PTL” and then got into the APRS network.
