Amateur Radio Questions and Answers

Amateur Radio Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for amateur radio enthusiasts. It's currently in public beta, and a lot of good questions already have great answers.

The Stack Exchange Q&A site format is very popular in programmer circles - take a look at Stack Overflow for example - good questions and answers get voted up, and the best answers are prominently displayed, unlike in traditional discussion groups and mailing list archives where the good bits are often buried in the middle of a lot of uninformed answers and chatter that is only slightly related to the original question.

If you've got an amateur radio related question, please post it there. If not, try answering one of the unanswered questions. It's actually a lot of fun!

The site is currently in a beta, and needs a little push (questions, answers, votes) to keep going.

Start with the instructions on the About page.

blog.aprs.fi !

This aprs.fi news blog has, as of today, moved to the address where it should have been born in the first place: http://blog.aprs.fi/ !

Please update your links and bookmarks, if you have any. Thanks.

Plug-n-play APRS (not!) and lack of APRS documentation

Gary Hoffman, KB0H writes on the ARRL web site (The Amateur Amateur: APRS, the Beginning):

"I was still interested enough in APRS that I Googled it the next day. There were a great many sites dedicated to the field, so I skimmed a random sampling of them. Wow! Everything I read seemed highly technical, and none of it described what APRS actually was. The only solid piece of information I was able to garner was that if you called it Automatic Position Reporting System, the APRS Police would come knocking at your door. But just what was APRS? I still didn’t know.

Skip forward a few years.

The term APRS caught my notice from time to time, so I periodically went back to the Internet to see if I could figure it out. I didn’t have much luck. I did find a commercial Web site, byonics.com that sold APRS equipment, but all of the products seemed to be geared toward hams who already had a pretty good grasp of the subject."

I have to agree with him – the obvious places to find documentation for beginners (the Wikipedia page and, especially, aprs.org) do not have it. The wiki page goes quickly pretty deep into a technical network and protocol overview right after the introduction. aprs.org is a mess – it spends a lot of time complaining how APRS really isn't what most people are using it for, and doesn't really have any starting points. And there are broken links. The APRS Wiki has something, but it isn't very strong or up-to-date either.

G4ILO has written an article, APRS - Putting ham radio on the map, which I find pretty good – probably not the least because he says aprs.fi is "the best". It would be good to have this on the APRS Wiki.

If you manage to actually buy some hardware to use APRS, the configuration programs and menus are also very hard to use. I heard or read somewhere that some amateur clubs now have monthly meetings on the topic of programming radios (which actually means going through the menus to get settings right). The Byonics and Argent configuration tools show an awful lot of settings to start with. Most of the defaults are OK and you only need to fix your callsign and the audio levels, but it's way too easy to make configurations which break things for yourself (for example, by selecting invalid symbol codes instead of picking the symbol image from a table). Many misconfigurations actually break the network by transmitting way too often, or with abusive long paths.

I strongly think that the configuration programs should be improved to not accept any abusive or broken configurations. Also, they should initially only show the settings you really, really need to change (your callsign, comment text, TX audio level, and "pick a symbol image from this graphic table of images"). Most other settings should go to an "advanced settings" menu of some sort. Think Apple and the iPhone – to get regular users started it needs to be simple and lean. Path setting should, even in the Advanced menu, consist of a drop-down selection of "1 hop", "2 hops", or "3 hops" which would translate to something like WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2 somewhere behind the scene (with maybe a checkbox for "use TRACE instead of WIDE"). Free-form path entry should be in the Very-Super-Advanced configuration file, and even then the tracker firmware should refuse a WIDE3-7,TRACE9-9 path.

If you're looking for a little programming project, I'd guess Scott wouldn't mind if someone would improve the OpenTracker Windows config program a bit. It's Open Source, after all.

I suppose I should look at my software, too. aprs.fi doesn't have a proper beginner's guide, either. Or an user's manual. There are only 4 tooltips, and 14 help links (which are not localised). Awful.

theborg989 has uploaded a nice introductory aprs.fi video on Youtube. It could use a sequel which would describe things like tracking multiple stations and using the tools in the top right corner of the display.