Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Device Identification, and a rate advisor fix

I've just installed support for APRS device identification. The info page now makes an attempt to show the type of tracker or software being used by the station. The identification data collection started just a few minutes ago, so most stations are still not identified, but they're getting identified as packets are transmitted. The identification happens when position packets are received, so you'll need to send some packets to update the identification. For example, here's an VX-8G:

http://aprs.fi/info/a/KE6SLS-7

As a nice side effect the comment fields of mic-e stations are getting cleaned up from the device identification characters.

I've also updated the packet rate advisor to use an arithmetic mean of the packet transmit interval instead of a median. Some stations which sent two packets in a row (with 2 seconds between the 2 packets) every 30 minutes (giving an average interval of 15 minutes) sometimes quite correctly got a 2-second median interval, and got a "very high rate" warning.

The APRS packet parser was upgraded to Ham::APRS::FAP version 1.16 (to support the device identification).

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