I just finished installing an upgrade on aprs.fi. I had forgotten a configuration change that needed to be done with this upgrade, and the web service stopped working at 19:16 UTC. I had some trouble finding the problem, and managed to fix it at 19:38 UTC. That was completely unnecessary, sorry for the trouble. It should have been a routine upgrade requiring only a minute of downtime or so. Data collection was not interrupted.
The upgrade made the telemetry graph page update itself automatically as new values come in from the station, just like the weather page does. Just look up a telemetry station and leave the graph page open and the contents will be magically updated!
The grapher engine got a little upgrade which enables graph value lookups on all graphs. Just hover the mouse cursor above a graph and the labels will display the values reported at that time. While the pointer is between reported values it will display an interpolated value.
The real-time map's data refreshing algorithm got some updates and fixes.
I did a few updates on strings too, and the translations need to be updated. At least on the moving stations page I had to split a very long string to two short ones.
The news of https://aprs.fi/ - new features and interesting attractions found in the APRS and AIS worlds.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Telemetry display improvements
After attaching some 1wire temperature sensors to the USB port of my D-Link DIR-825 WLAN router running OpenWRT, and making aprx transmit the temperatures in the new base91 comment telemetry format, I felt like improving the telemetry display on aprs.fi a bit.
Current telemetry values are now shown in the info balloon of a station on the real-time map.
I always thought that many telemetry transmitters are only utilizing a few channels, and the other channels should not be shown. So here goes, now you can configure which channels are shown. If any channel names have been sent using the "PARM." message, only those channels (and bits) are displayed in the current telemetry values summary. If no names have been sent, all 5 analog channels and 8 bits are shown.
The telemetry coefficients transmitted with the EQNS. message now stores 5 decimal digits instead of 3. Base91 comment telemetry supports 13 bits of resolution (values 0 to 8280), which often needs to be scaled down to a range such as -55...+125C for temperature. More decimals in the multiplier and exponent parts help in making it accurate.
Current telemetry values are now shown in the info balloon of a station on the real-time map.
I always thought that many telemetry transmitters are only utilizing a few channels, and the other channels should not be shown. So here goes, now you can configure which channels are shown. If any channel names have been sent using the "PARM." message, only those channels (and bits) are displayed in the current telemetry values summary. If no names have been sent, all 5 analog channels and 8 bits are shown.
The telemetry coefficients transmitted with the EQNS. message now stores 5 decimal digits instead of 3. Base91 comment telemetry supports 13 bits of resolution (values 0 to 8280), which often needs to be scaled down to a range such as -55...+125C for temperature. More decimals in the multiplier and exponent parts help in making it accurate.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Dead reckoning and radio horizon circles
 |
| This large passenger boat is actually making some turns between the islands. |
To limit the performance impact of this feature the DR indicator will be shown for a single station at a time. Click on a station to enable it. It's also enabled automatically for a tracked station.
Naturally it'll show some rather bogus estimations for vehicles which have stopped moving but have not transmitted a new packet with a speed of 0. Most trackers installed in cars loose their power input before they have a chance of transmitting a packet at the parking spot.
 |
| A plane flying at 2648 feet, and the digipeaters and igates which have received it. |
The circles are useful for estimating the distance at which the station can be heard, which can be of use for tracking teams of high-altitude balloons. It also gives pilots an idea of the large amount of digipeaters and igates in range.
The circles are drawn for stations having a suitable symbol when the altitude is over 100 meters. Other stations will also get the circles when their altitude reaches 1000 meters.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
aprs.fi upgrade on Monday 2012-03-19
aprs.fi will be upgraded on Monday 2012-03-19. Some downtime should be expected, starting around 9 AM local time (0700 UTC). If you can find some bugs in beta.aprs.fi, this is the time to report and get them fixed before they make their way to aprs.fi! Here's the long list of changes included in the upgrade. It's so long that, as usual, some new bugs will probably pop up. Please report them on the discussion group and I'll try to get them fixed right away.
Anchor navigation and more AJAX
The technical implementation of the navigation in the real-time map has been completely changed. In the new model the map page is not reloaded from the servers and initialized again from scratch every time an user changes the view by searching for a new callsign or an address. This AJAX magic will make callsign searches and other view modifications considerably faster, especially on slow computers and slow connections such as mobile devices. It'll also reduce load on my and Google's servers. And make the browser's bookmark functions and the back button work better than before.
All of the links used by aprs.fi to refer to specific map views have changed, but the traditional ones documented on the linking instructions page will keep working, and I encourage you to use them as before - they're not going anywhere.
Try searching for OH2K and OH2TI one by one again and again, and you'll notice both the improved loading speed, and a nice panning effect. It'll pan whenever the newly searched station is close enough to the current view.
Improved address search
Address search has been improved to make a better use of the data returned by Google's API. A marker for the result is now only shown if the result is accurate (such as a street, or a house number on a specific street).
Address search will also adjust the zoom level - "Finland" or "Pohjois-Karjala" or "USA" should actually fit the specified region in view. The zoom levels come from Google and I can not make it any smarter than that (yes, "USA" will zoom out a bit too much). But it's certainly better than it was (fixed zoom level after address search).
Improved response times
When you make changes to the real-time map view, for example by zooming out or selecting a time range, aprs.fi will now react much more quickly.
New time range back/forward buttons
When a station is tracked, there are now two new handy additional arrow buttons to jump the time range back and forward. If you have selected an arbitrary range, it will jump the same amount back (select a week, and it'll jump to the previous week). Otherwise it'll select the current whole day (UTC 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 - sorry, no local time support yet) on the first click, and the following clicks will jump by 24 hours.
Sharper map graphics on iPad/iPhone
The scaling of the web page was tuned to switch automatically so that map graphics are not blurred on the iOS devices, especially when the device switches between landscape and portrait orientation.
Other small things
Searching for "OH2RDK" will now give a proper "there are other SSIDs available although this one doesn't exist" response.
aprs.fi now uses a new version of the Google Maps API, bringing in some visual updates and speedups from Google.
An old bug which makes stations disappear after a quick zoom-in-and-back-out operation (and some other cases) has been fixed.
The "street view is off by 200 meters" bug is fixed. Also, the map should stay centered when Street View is enabled or disabled.
The ruler tool now displays distances shorter than 1 km in meters to allow measuring short distances.
When a station is tracked on a mobile device, the info balloon does not automatically pop up and block the whole view.
Raw packets view in decoded mode displays the position packet's type (compressed, mic-e...).
Tuned digipeater/igate "heard" map to collect more data and leave less gaps in the map.
Support for new major version of the database server (SQL syntax changes).
CSRF security fixes were implemented in many places.
Some rough corners have been rounded up (literally), and a few shadows have been cast (again, literally).
Does aprs.fi feel slow?
Be sure to try it with a modern, quick browser such as Google Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer 9. If you're upgrading from Firefox or an older Internet Explorer, you'll be surprised by the difference it makes.
Anchor navigation and more AJAX
 |
| Achilles (left) and Ajax (right) play a board game with knucklebones on this late 6th-century lekythos, a type of oil-storing vessel associated with funeral rites. Photo taken in Musée du Louvre by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2011 (CC by attribution, Wikipedia/Wikimedia). |
All of the links used by aprs.fi to refer to specific map views have changed, but the traditional ones documented on the linking instructions page will keep working, and I encourage you to use them as before - they're not going anywhere.
Try searching for OH2K and OH2TI one by one again and again, and you'll notice both the improved loading speed, and a nice panning effect. It'll pan whenever the newly searched station is close enough to the current view.
Improved address search
Address search has been improved to make a better use of the data returned by Google's API. A marker for the result is now only shown if the result is accurate (such as a street, or a house number on a specific street).
Address search will also adjust the zoom level - "Finland" or "Pohjois-Karjala" or "USA" should actually fit the specified region in view. The zoom levels come from Google and I can not make it any smarter than that (yes, "USA" will zoom out a bit too much). But it's certainly better than it was (fixed zoom level after address search).
Improved response times
When you make changes to the real-time map view, for example by zooming out or selecting a time range, aprs.fi will now react much more quickly.
New time range back/forward buttons
When a station is tracked, there are now two new handy additional arrow buttons to jump the time range back and forward. If you have selected an arbitrary range, it will jump the same amount back (select a week, and it'll jump to the previous week). Otherwise it'll select the current whole day (UTC 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 - sorry, no local time support yet) on the first click, and the following clicks will jump by 24 hours.
Sharper map graphics on iPad/iPhone
The scaling of the web page was tuned to switch automatically so that map graphics are not blurred on the iOS devices, especially when the device switches between landscape and portrait orientation.
Other small things
Searching for "OH2RDK" will now give a proper "there are other SSIDs available although this one doesn't exist" response.
aprs.fi now uses a new version of the Google Maps API, bringing in some visual updates and speedups from Google.
An old bug which makes stations disappear after a quick zoom-in-and-back-out operation (and some other cases) has been fixed.
The "street view is off by 200 meters" bug is fixed. Also, the map should stay centered when Street View is enabled or disabled.
The ruler tool now displays distances shorter than 1 km in meters to allow measuring short distances.
When a station is tracked on a mobile device, the info balloon does not automatically pop up and block the whole view.
Raw packets view in decoded mode displays the position packet's type (compressed, mic-e...).
Tuned digipeater/igate "heard" map to collect more data and leave less gaps in the map.
Support for new major version of the database server (SQL syntax changes).
CSRF security fixes were implemented in many places.
Some rough corners have been rounded up (literally), and a few shadows have been cast (again, literally).
Does aprs.fi feel slow?
Be sure to try it with a modern, quick browser such as Google Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer 9. If you're upgrading from Firefox or an older Internet Explorer, you'll be surprised by the difference it makes.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Data collection outage on Sunday, 2011-01-29
Sorry for the trouble!
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
aprs.fi closed in U.S. on Wednesday
aprs.fi will join Wikipedia and Reddit, and protest the proposed U.S. SOPA/PROTECT-IP legislation by closing down on Wednesday. (News about Reddit blackout, and Wikipedia joining it.)
The aprs.fi outage will only affect clients in the United States (or those with IP address mapping an U.S. network operator - the targeting is not fully accurate).
Although the law is being made in the U.S., it will break the Internet on a global scale by making sites such as aprs.fi liable for links and content posted by the users of the site. Sites like aprs.fi are commonly run by individual developers or small volunteer teams. Due to the huge volume of automatically published user-generated content (50 packets per second currently!) it would be impossible for me to go through it all before publishing. If some APRS user would post links to copyright-infringing material, even when that material would reside somewhere else than aprs.fi itself, aprs.fi could be shut down in the U.S. and there would not be much that I could do about it. See how difficult it was for a falsely censored music blog to get unblocked under the current legislation.
The law claims to be targeted at pirate web sites, but it won't have any practical effect on criminal file sharing, since those networks can very easily switch to new domain names and IP addresses, or bypass the DNS altogether with modern peer-to-peer technologies. Instead, it will force web site administrators such as myself to pre-censor data (by, for example, removing user-posted links completely). In practice: no home page link shown with your APRS station on aprs.fi. This is just silly – on other sites which depend more on linking out it could ruin the whole show.
If you're an U.S. citizen, you can probably do something about this that would actually make a difference. I'm not there, so I can't (but I voted yesterday evening in Finland's presidential election!). Please read through the material on the Reddit blackout page, there are good "Learn More" and "Get Involved" sections in the end!
Data collection will be running as usual, so Wednesday's data will be available on Thursday.
Now I'm really happy that aprs.fi is aprs.fi instead of aprs.com or aprs.net. And that I'm not living in the UK. The really bad news is that similar laws are being pushed in Europe.
PS. You can get your APRS location from http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?YOURCALL or DB0ANF. If a life-threatening disaster would happen in the U.S. let me know and I'll open up the site.
The aprs.fi outage will only affect clients in the United States (or those with IP address mapping an U.S. network operator - the targeting is not fully accurate).
Although the law is being made in the U.S., it will break the Internet on a global scale by making sites such as aprs.fi liable for links and content posted by the users of the site. Sites like aprs.fi are commonly run by individual developers or small volunteer teams. Due to the huge volume of automatically published user-generated content (50 packets per second currently!) it would be impossible for me to go through it all before publishing. If some APRS user would post links to copyright-infringing material, even when that material would reside somewhere else than aprs.fi itself, aprs.fi could be shut down in the U.S. and there would not be much that I could do about it. See how difficult it was for a falsely censored music blog to get unblocked under the current legislation.
The law claims to be targeted at pirate web sites, but it won't have any practical effect on criminal file sharing, since those networks can very easily switch to new domain names and IP addresses, or bypass the DNS altogether with modern peer-to-peer technologies. Instead, it will force web site administrators such as myself to pre-censor data (by, for example, removing user-posted links completely). In practice: no home page link shown with your APRS station on aprs.fi. This is just silly – on other sites which depend more on linking out it could ruin the whole show.
If you're an U.S. citizen, you can probably do something about this that would actually make a difference. I'm not there, so I can't (but I voted yesterday evening in Finland's presidential election!). Please read through the material on the Reddit blackout page, there are good "Learn More" and "Get Involved" sections in the end!
Data collection will be running as usual, so Wednesday's data will be available on Thursday.
Now I'm really happy that aprs.fi is aprs.fi instead of aprs.com or aprs.net. And that I'm not living in the UK. The really bad news is that similar laws are being pushed in Europe.
PS. You can get your APRS location from http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?YOURCALL or DB0ANF. If a life-threatening disaster would happen in the U.S. let me know and I'll open up the site.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
K6RPT-11 APRS balloon from California in Europe - igates needed for 144.390!
Updated 2011-12-14: Still flying, igates needed further west!
An APRS-equipped high-altitude balloon, using the callsign K6RPT-11 (track on aprs.fi), launched from San Jose, California, has almost crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and is now passing Azores, and approaching North Africa. With a little change in direction it could as well go to Spain or Portugal! It was already a great success when it managed to travel to the east coast of the US.
There is a catch - it's transmitting on the US frequency of 144.390 MHz instead of the usual European frequency of 144.800 MHz. That's will help reception, since 144.390 is very quiet around here, but we need some igates in Morocco, Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and so on, to temporarily switch frequencies - and do it now! Keep an eye on the track - it could be coming your way!
Please help spread the word, right now, tonight, amongst igate operators around that area.
There might be a very fun recovery operation ahead for some hams down there.
Stephen H. Smith wrote:
"The K6RPT-1 APRS-equipped high-altitude balloon left the U.S. mainland, headed out over the Atlantic about 0330 UTC Tuesday after a coast-to-coast crossing of the US from the San Jose, California launch site.
Radio contact was lost about 400 miles off the New Jersey coast. At that point it was still transmitting and reporting normal battery voltage, holding altitude around 107,000 ft, and headed toward the Straights of Gibraltar at about 150 MPH (240 KM/h)."
"It's now around sunset at it's current location, so it looks as though the balloon's envelope survived the day's UV exposure -- better and better chance now it WILL make landfall over there. ."
Links:
http://twitter.com/k6rpt (Balloon project's twitter feed)
http://www.californianearspaceproject.com/
An APRS-equipped high-altitude balloon, using the callsign K6RPT-11 (track on aprs.fi), launched from San Jose, California, has almost crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and is now passing Azores, and approaching North Africa. With a little change in direction it could as well go to Spain or Portugal! It was already a great success when it managed to travel to the east coast of the US.
There is a catch - it's transmitting on the US frequency of 144.390 MHz instead of the usual European frequency of 144.800 MHz. That's will help reception, since 144.390 is very quiet around here, but we need some igates in Morocco, Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and so on, to temporarily switch frequencies - and do it now! Keep an eye on the track - it could be coming your way!
Please help spread the word, right now, tonight, amongst igate operators around that area.
There might be a very fun recovery operation ahead for some hams down there.
Stephen H. Smith wrote:
"The K6RPT-1 APRS-equipped high-altitude balloon left the U.S. mainland, headed out over the Atlantic about 0330 UTC Tuesday after a coast-to-coast crossing of the US from the San Jose, California launch site.
Radio contact was lost about 400 miles off the New Jersey coast. At that point it was still transmitting and reporting normal battery voltage, holding altitude around 107,000 ft, and headed toward the Straights of Gibraltar at about 150 MPH (240 KM/h)."
"It's now around sunset at it's current location, so it looks as though the balloon's envelope survived the day's UV exposure -- better and better chance now it WILL make landfall over there. ."
Links:
http://twitter.com/k6rpt (Balloon project's twitter feed)
http://www.californianearspaceproject.com/
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