Saturday, March 25, 2017

New version of aprs.fi's APRS packet parser released: Ham::APRS::FAP v1.21

Yesterday I uploaded a new version of the APRS packet parser used by aprs.fi, Ham::APRS::FAP, to the CPAN. It's open source, so if you're a little bit weird like me and enjoy programming in Perl, this might be useful. Here's a full list of changes:
  • Improve make_position() to support HMS UTC timestamp. make_position() now returns the packet type character so that it can signal the presence of a timestamp.
  • Improve make_position() to support comment string, !DAO! extension, altitude encoding. Fix rounding errors in lat/lon/speed. Support generating packets with no speed or course. Take optional parameters in a hash parameter. Implement unit tests for make_position().
  • Set up Travis automatic running of the (existing) unit test runs.
  • Additional character escaping in regular expressions to deal with deprecated functionality in Perl 5.22.
The packet parser is one of the more complete APRS decoders, although I'm not sure if any of the parsers deal with all of the APRS features and packet variants yet.