So…. after our Weather Balloon Presentation at the Wellington Radio Club, I decided I was going to check out my APRS Beacon setup that I have in my vehicle a Mini-Trak connected directly into my vehicles battery with a relay that will power off the unit after the engine turns off give or take about 5-10 seconds after. This allows me to track my vehicle and play with the data afterward.  Well, it was time to dust off the device as I had not used it in a while. Last time I really used it was when I was on vacation and went to Puerto Rico and drove to the largest Radio Telescope there is.

This weekend I decided to check out how I can use my raspberry pi and my Custom Made RTLSDR as an iGate. I went online and found some information on Github as well as other sources. Some information worked some did not, especially the location beaconing, I ended up using UTM coordinates (Zone=17r easting=xxxxxx northing=xxxxxx). After getting this iGate finished and coded I had a Working iGate that captured all the radio transmissions on 144.390Mhz. After I got this going I left the project working on my office network rack, it consumes little to no bandwidth and power so why not leave it operational?!.

On Sunday I wondered what about the server this thing connects to? (ig) Well, I went and read a bit more for about 10 minutes and found the open source code for APRSC binaries. I went and created my own APRSC Server then went to take a nap and get ready for the hurricanes that are coming our way (Hurricane Irma). After this I went and sat in my office and did a bit more coding and linked up the server to their network and monitored it for a bit, I found that they are using bootstrap so I did some custom code to make it look better for my taste.

And thus concludes my APRS Weekend. If you are interested in seeing the iGate search for KM4OOD-10, for the Server you can navigate to my IO Webpage (Malave.io) and go to the APRSC.malave.io site this will show you the server and its glory. Now I will leave this running for about a month but because I am using an external server it will charge me 10$. I will make an image if I ever find a cheaper way to host this server, in the mean time it’s in the pool of servers. Enjoy!