Sunday, February 22, 2009

Single-target APRS packet paths

The APRS packet path plotting now works while tracking a single target. As a natural side-effect, all of the stations used as digipeaters and igates by the tracked target will also be shown on the map.

On Saturday I also made some significant changes in the backend code, which should make it scale out a bit better. I added some more in-memory caching which should speed things up so that the addition of things like APRS packet paths will not cause a significant performance hit.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

This is a great feature! Thanks for all that you do do keep aprs.fi up and running

73

KC7IIB

Anonymous said...

This is awsome! I can now see instantly which digipeaters are picking up the track. Thanks. I am a private pilot, and run an MT-AIO running in my back seat during flights, thanks APRS.FI for making ham radio fun again!

Unknown said...

I'm loving it! aprs.fi spoils me for all of the APRS clients out there.

Ever thought about writing an APRS client so we can have some excellent APRS visualization tools when we are off the web?

Hessu said...

VE6SRV: Yes, I've thought about it, but I don't have time to do everything that would be interesting. And there's hardly any code in aprs.fi that could be reused in a desktop APRS client.

Anonymous said...

A desktop APRS client certainly could run inside a web browser, working against a web server on the same machine. Being dependent on on-line maps would probably not be acceptable, though. However, Openstreetmap is making excellent progress, the data is open and could be pre-rendered. But I'm sure switching from Google Maps would be a lot of work.

Jon LA4RT, Trondheim, Norway

Anonymous said...

Thank you for all that you do. I love the features you have on here. It far outweighs anything else I've seen.

As it stands, is there a way to extend the time range for a map that is embedded into my website?

Thank you again.

Hessu said...

Joe: Thank you, I'm happy you like it! Sorry, currently there's no way to extend the time. All of the embeddable map options are listed at http://aprs.fi/page/embed.

Jon: Yup, you could do a web UI on localhost, but due to the programming languages and database used on aprs.fi, it's not really feasible to make a desktop version from the same codebase. It would be a separate project, and quite a big one.

Using OpenStreetMaps is becoming a very good options in many countries. I've looked at using it on aprs.fi, but haven't done the rewrapping yet. It's quite some work, since I'm using the widgets provided by the gmaps API a lot. It would definitely be good for a desktop application (providing a wizard to download and prerender maps for a selected area).

Unknown said...

Single target tracking on a balloon wandering past Nova Scotia, and headed for Newfoundland right now. This sure works great for seeing just how far those packets can travel from 30,000 feet ASL. The St John's, NL network is picking up the balloon from over 400 kms away.