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
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.