APRS? Where are the hams?

While digging into the brave new world of ham radio and looking up my old stomping ground of packet radio I came across Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System (see wiki). To cut a long story short it’s a system of broadcasting your position over ham radio.


There are web sites where you can track of all these signal like http://aprs.fi/ and http://www.openaprs.net/ or pick them up off air? I live in a black hole for APRS figures :-(.

But this has not stopped me from finding PC sound card decoding software and listening to the main frequency in the UK 144.800 MHz I’ve heard some signal but PC was not plugged in at time.

APRS was first designed for sending positional data in emergencies but if in range or on internet you can also get weather reports. Local to me but not in radio range is http://www.oaprs.net/search/EGFF at Cardiff Wales airport which sends out a stream of weather data. Looking like this 14 C / 57.2 F 87% 996.30mbar 270° W 13.7 MPH (gust: 0.0 MPH) and you can get it’s graphs from http://www.oaprs.net/graph/weather/day/EGFF. There are others that should be in range of me?

All looks very cool and techy but I still have not figured it all out, like how this data gets on web when I don’t hear a lot of signal on 144.800 MHz, how you build a tracker for you self and how to decode off air got some programs but they take a lot of setting up virtual serial ports and TCP/IP forwarding.

If anyone knows of a APRS run and see data program let me know?