New Feature: Broadcast Your Messages

For those that are receiving, please check your Messages app. You’ll see a few strange, non-APRS messages. Those were sent directly (well, indirectly) from the forums. This is how it works.

  1. Create a new topic.
  2. Select the category MESSAGES
  3. Enter your message in the title of the topic. The character limit for titles is 200 characters, so that is the maximum length of your message.
  4. Add a period (or any random character) to the body of the text. The body of the topic is not broadcast.
  5. Wait about a minute, maybe two.
  6. Check the Messages app on Skylark, or the following directory under File Manager:
    downloads/Amateur Radio/APRS/APRSAT
  7. Your username is appended to the message.
  8. That’s it.

After the message is broadcast, the bot will mark the topic as closed. The topic is also marked as unlisted, so that messages do not overload the main forum page.

This system is fully operational, so please have fun with it.

8 Likes

That works really well!
But i dont like the many topics that get created just to send a message, maybe we should implement a nicer way to submit the Messages :slight_smile:

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Yeah, that’s something to adjust in the forum software, though I’m not sure if that’s possible.

The messages should not be closed and unlisted, so they will no longer appear in the main forum page. Clicking on the Messages category will show all of the topics that have been created and broadcast.

@Syed Have you looked at all into commercial use of the system? I (and probably others) have a need to send short messages every now and then (32 bytes of data for a transaction) and would be willing to buy a package allowing me to send up to X messages / Y MB or similar.

1 Like

Yes, but as of now, there seem not to be very many commercial users for the service.

The message broadcast will always be available for free, though in the future commercial users may have priority access to the data feed. For example, the free service has no guaranteed quality of service, where as paid delivery is sent within X-seconds.

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Hi @Syed , I see messages in the “message” app
for example 3/19/2021 edt 10:09am

But what is best way to read the message… I can select the message
… but how to read the text ??

for example… I am going into file manager

only the subject line is broadcast (up to 200 characters). the message body is discarded.