APRS: More Cool Things You Can Do With Radio
I’ve recently acquired my amateur radio license (technical level) and joined the Binghamton Amateur Radio Association (BARA). BARA is based out of the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center, and among their fairly extensive collection of equipment is a 2 Meter Band Yaesu radio connected to a computer with a Terminal Node Controller (TNC), which performs digital repeating for their instance of APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). I worked on a project to migrate their current setup to a Raspberry Pi and tnc-pi based system , which meant that I got to learn about APRS! APRS is a means of communicating real-time data using radio, such as weather information from weather stations, station/radio tracking via GPS (Global Positioning System) satellites, text messages, and more. The radio transmits a series of tones (which sound like a modem) to one or more digital repeaters, known as digipeaters, that take a radio signal broadcast from another station and re-transmit it to other stations. Some of these digipeaters may also be connected to the Internet to relay packets containin