APRS Reporting seems to not be working, for me at least

App_rpt-users
1

Being that information I have found here in the forum (not much) and on the wiki (not at all) does not address my issues/questions, I decided to go ahead and post a topic here which may just be an easy answer and a problem of proper wording in the search feature on my part.

BUT!!

After being a long time user of the AllStarLink/HamVoip (whichever) system, I have decided to enable my nodes APRS feature using the ASL distro on a Raspberry Pi. I have setup the gps.conf file as much as i can understand each lines definitions, enabled the module, restarted Asterisk and WALA, I am on the map.

But, I noticed my antenna height, radio wattage, gain, direction and calculated range (based on all of the previous) were way wrong.

So I decided to change those parameters, shown below, to see how the information showed up on the APRS maps to try to get a general idea of how this all worked:
elev = 1 ; Elevation of Antenna in Meters (NOT HAAT)
power = 100 ; Power level
height = 1 ; Antenna Height in HAAT
gain = 5 ; Antenna Gain
dir = 0 ; Antenna Direction

1st, of course (see docs allstarlink org/drupal/node/14, had to remove https://) doesn’t exist anymore and takes you to AllStarLink Wiki

2nd and on, my antenna height shows as 320’, gain shows as 0, direction shows as SW, power is 16W, and calculated range is 23.39 Miles. These are the same information that was displayed with my proper settings in the file and shows on both https://aprs-map.info and https://aprs.fi.

BTW, frequency and tone do not show up in the APRS information at all so I put it in the comment txt which, along with the coordinates and callsign show as expected.

Is there some other setup procedures to get this right?
Are there other current sources of setup information for this and ASL in general for its many features?

Thanks all and everyone

Harold
K7ILO
Las Vegas, NV. 27863

2

But then again, maybe it was my reporting time as a stationary object. I changed my beacon time to 1hr, which was at the default of of 10m and restarted asterisk and now i am showing what it should be with the current settings mentioned earlier.

Hmmmmm, now Im wondering. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks again

3

Naaa the reporting is way off. Not sure.

4

HI,

APRS beacon protocol is a bit ( that’s ironic ) weird.

You will find more infos here :
http://www.aprs.org/APRS-docs/PROTOCOL.TXT

An HAAT calculator here :
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/haat-calculator

Take a coffee before reading this :slightly_smiling_face:

73 Patrick

5

Thanks Patrick

I called myself calculating correctly my HAAT using that calculator. Maybe it takes a little bit for changes to take place in the APRS network. It’s been a FEW years since I’ve played in the APRS game and I mean a FEW. The protocol doc will definitely help since I’m sure there has been many changes.

BTW, just to confirm, all measurements for the gps.conf file should be in meters, correct?

I’ll go over everything again and make my settings and see where that takes me.

Thanks again

Harold
K7ILO
Las Vegas, NV. 27863

6

Harold,

You can simply use the following doc make a convertion of HAAT, power to APRS datas.
https://wiki.allstarlink.org/wiki/Gps.conf

Some values are in meters others in feet.
Why should it simple ? :grimacing:

73 Patrick

7

As you can see, there is no need to calculate a precise HAAT, because there are ONLY 10 numbers to determine the altitude in APRS !
There is i.e no difference between 1280 and 2560 feet ! :slight_smile:

I put the lowest rounding value.
Here the gps.conf for one of our repeaters :

freq=430.150 ; Display Frequency of station
tone=88.5 ; CTCSS tone of station (0.0 for none)
lat=41.7691 ; Fixed (default) latitude in decimal degrees
lon=8.7723 ; Fixed (default) longitude in decimal degrees
elev=630 ; Elevation of Antenna in Meters (NOT HAAT)
power=3 ; Power level (see below)
height=7 ; Antenna Height in HAAT (see below)
gain=3 ; Antenna Gain (see below)
dir=0 ; Antenna Direction (see below)

73 Patrick

8

So of course I had a AH HA moment with the numbers that actually need to be entered. I was putting actual footages in instead of the single digit numbers. Along with your protocol doc from APRS-docs, I found a shorter version at http://www.aprs.org/aprsdos-pix/phg.txt specifically about the numbers we need to enter.

Thanks Patrick for your assistance. I have it all setup properly now. Now to turn everything I turned off, trying to figure this out, back on LOL.

73
Harold
K7ILO
Las Vegas, NV. 27863

9

Glad if I could hekp.
Meanwhile, I found this web page :
http://n6jer.blogspot.com/2017/07/updating-aprs-with-allstar-node.html

One thing I didn’t know is when putting power parameter = 0 , does send ONLY the comment parameter. That can be usefull !

What is your nodes callsign ?

73 Patrick