APRS – Making it work

Didn’t get to it last night but just saw your RF message on UI-View32 this morning and the download on Skylark. Also checked out the location of N0PTL-- we lived in Blue Springs back in the mid-80’s.

Cool! Yep, lived most of my life in the greater KC area, both MO and KS. I saw some of your messages this morning on the sat feed. Fun to play around with. I did a lot of playing with APRS when I first got licensed but I hadn’t even turned the stuff on for a while. This thread inspired me to try it so I could send messages down the sat feed, now I may have to try to bounce off the ISS again (never got it done before but mostly because I have tried using an HT with a rubber duck). Did you see you also got a response today from M0KNC-3 as well?

Don’t see the message from M0KNC. As an experiment I ran the CHIP for 15 hours on a battery pack and it died at 1305 UTC this morning. If not too much trouble could you post the text from that download and I’ll send a response.

There are some good ideas in this thread that may let me set up my Baofeng and transmit to an igate on the Raspberry Pi and then to the internet. The author of the RPi app has a link to the image he created. Any thoughts on that overall approach?

For some reason I didn’t see it either. I happened to catch it when doing some searches on arps.fi website. Looks like M0KNC has been testing OUTNET too! here it is:

2017-02-06 09:37:46 CST: M0KNC-3>APSK63,WIDE1-1,GATE,WIDE2-1,qAR,DF4AE-11::KE7KRF :Hi back from the UK via OUTNET & 30mtrs 2{9

Here is the search:

http://aprs.fi/?c=raw&call=M0KNC-3&limit=50&view=normal

I built the Raspberry Pi APRS RX iGate today (link in an earlier post in this thread from Zoltan) and then downloaded the PocketPacket app for my iPod Touch. Since I am not receiving packets right now, all it took was a stereo plug from the iPod headphone plug to the mic plug on the Baofeng. And it actually worked. Sent my first RF APRS packet, received by my RPi iGate and up to OUTNET.

Message was addressed to you.

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Congrats! That is a nice bit of ‘junk drawer’ hacking to get something to experiment with. Now you need to set up another Pi as a digipeter so you can simulate a full APRS regional system.

-Cecil

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Very slick! I do see it in my Outernet APRS feed!

Yah…still amazed it all came together. But a digipeater in our remote area might be underutilized. Will definitely look into it though. But I could soon run out of RPi’s!

@dschieszer @dschre
I run a beacon from M0KNC when I am not away . - usually only during that daylight hours in the UK , and often via HF ( either 10.14760Mhz using 300baud packet (M0KNC-3) or 10.147Mhz using PSkMail (M0KNC) - using 10Watts ) so it is very much hit & miss, proabaly only 5% of the transmissions make it to the Internet APRS backbone ( an thus to Outernet). When I am nearby & see that a beacon gets through, as well as at random times, I will manually send a “hello”

  • Using VHF is too easy LOL! I like a challenge

So you wont always see me in the output from Outernet… I have been away for a few days recently too

BTW the 10Watts is because I have a home made mag loop for 30 Mtrs and the capacitor cant handle much power - I can tune a wire I have up and be a lot “louder” , but I get so much noise from internet of powerlines (PLC) here in Winchester that using the wire makes me “deaf”
PLC’s are a BLIGHT on the RF spectum and should be banned :frowning:
http://www.rtl-sdr.com/showing-the-hf-interference-problem-from-ethernet-over-powerline-devices/

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Well done on the igate :slight_smile:
Like @CRCasey says , great "junk drawer hacking"
And you can NEVER have too many RPi’s!

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Re-read your original post that got me going with APRS. Even though the messages sent through the server got to Outnet and back, it was more interesting pursuing this approach. At the moment am looking at YAAC again to see how I might integrate with the current setup. The Pocket Packet to Baofeng is a bit clumsy but works. However I use PTT since the VOX doesn’t seem to be sensitive enough. It’s fun to see the whole chain of events work.

BTW I now address anything going to OUTNET with APOUT.

I have been an avid SWL for decades and all of the latest digital modes and learning to decode them is a fascinating part of the hobby. I don’t do typical ham stuff, have just the Technician License but it does give access to things like APRS.

Have been following the R Australia issue. Hope it can come alive on SW again – even if only in a limited fashion.

Richard

Has anyone else had any trouble installing the aprs-igate image? I downloaded successfully and when I tried to write the image to a 8GB memory card, Win32DiskImager locked up at around 2 percent completed. Reformatted card and tried again - got to 99 percent and locked. But must have imaged all the important stuff as it booted in the RPi and has been working fine since yesterday.

Kind of curious since I do this sort of thing all the time for various Raspberry Pi images and rarely have this happen.

Maybe time to run full diagnostics on the memory card even though it was working fine with its original image.

Richard

give it a try: Partition Recovery and File Undelete
once solved me a partition error

Yes, I got inspired and i needed a better coverage in my part of the city so I used that image to set up an RX-only Igate. I had some problems with the /boot partition being empty after writing the image to the sdcard with DD. I had to mount the image and do a copy of the files.
I took my oldest pi which is a B model with the yellow composite video out connector. Direwolf died with ‘illegal instruction’…
I had to tweak the Makefile.linux and recompile it to get it to work.
Now I am happy and can use my spare SDR stick and have better aprs coverage where I live.

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Good that you were able to resolve the issue. My knowledge of Linux is not that strong so often my approach is trial and error.

At the moment trying to find a way to display through the RPi a map dis[laying all of the APRS packet stations being heard. Most if not all of what I hear are through a fairly distant repeater.

Hey guys thought I would drop a note regarding APRS to the ISS. I successfully pulled it off the other day and even saw my message come up on the APRS logs in Outernet, so that is kind of fun (just think, it went from earth to space twice!). I wanted to let anyone else who wanted to try this know that there has been a change in the APRS frequency for ISS since last November. In October their normal radio went dead. They pulled out a backup and hooked it up for APRS, but it is on UHF. The frequency is 437.550. UHF is more susceptible to doppler so they recommend you program a set of channels and shift during the pass. This is how I set mine up.

The good news is that they should be back up and running on VHF sooner rather than later because the new radio was just delivered today!

https://www.issfanclub.com/node/42606

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Haven’t seen any Outernet APRS messages downloaded from the satellite for about a day now. Or could it be an issue with my setup? Have been experimenting with my iGate on a Raspberry Pi and the messages are showing up at aprs.fi

Richard
ke7krf

I see the downloads are back.

That is really cool :slight_smile: What Antenna are you using on 70cm to get to ISS?

I think that the “gateway” from APRis to Outernet is a bit flaky, and sometimes nothing gets through for a while… but it always comes good after a day or so :slight_smile:

BYW you say you use PTT to trigger Tx instead of VOX on the Baofeng, how have you set that up? as far as I know that is pretty tricky.