Table of Contents

Finding other Packet peers

To participate in the OARC Packet Project stations need to find other stations that are in range in order to hopefully peer with them. We have a map of members interested in participating, but it doesn't tell us who is actually in range of one another.

To get a better idea of who can reach who without entirely re-inventing the wheel I propose we use APRS to do the work for us. There's just one catch, APRS-IS, the service that collates packets for use with services such as aprs.fi de-duplicates packets. So if two stations here the same packet and iGate it, only the fastest station to submit it to APRS-IS will be visible as receiving the packet. This makes it less useful for discovering a stations potential peers as some of this information is lost.

To work around this I've created bodged together a special APRS-IS server that intercepts packets before they're submitted to the public APRS-IS servers and stores them in a database so we can plot maps and statistics for all packets, including dupes

Disclaimer

How do I use it?

Using the service is simple, just configure your iGate to forward packets to `aprs.2e0sip.co.uk`. This usually involves replacing something that looks like `region.aprs2.net` in your config.

Once you've started to beacon your location and send packets you should start to appear on the Grafana instance at https://aprs-grafana.2e0sip.co.uk/. The “APRS - Filtered” Dashboard allows you to see stats and maps for your iGate only (Select it top left) and the “APRS - All Stations” shows a map and stats for all connected stations. You can adjust the timeframe in the top right corner.

You can also view a more traditional “Track Direct” APRS style map at http://aprs.2e0sip.co.uk/ but note that packets are de-duplicated.

Things worth noting