Some aprs.fi email lost during the past weeks

Oops! For a couple weeks about 50% of the emails sent by aprs.fi have been going to the bit bucket due to a broken configuration on one of the servers. These included sign-up email confirmation and password recovery emails. Sorry about that!

The configuration is now fixed, and I've manually triggered a retransmit of the signup emails for the users who've signed up during the time but haven't yet clicked on the confirmation link.

I didn't want to be an engineer.

From the what-else-keeps-me-busy & off-topic department: It was a bit windy in Finland after christmas. So, this is what I found waiting at our summer cottage:

I didn't want to be an engineer. I wanted to be... a lumberjack!

I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay, I sleep all night and I work all day.

I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the lavatory.

On Wednesdays I go shoppin'

and have buttered scones for tea.

Luckily it didn't fall the other way, across the road and over the power line.

I couldn't help it - the lumberjack song played on repeat in my ears most of the day.

Next task: manually converting the wood to smaller bits and pieces to make them fit in the stove.

Upgrade: New server, Dead Reckoning, and some smaller stuff

One of aprs.fi's servers getting new disks

First I'd like to thank everyone who showed up in Ham Radio 2012, Friedrichshafen! It was really nice to meet you all.

aprs.fi's second server migration reached completion today. It's now running on two blade servers, each having two quad-core Xeon processors with 12MB cache each, for a total of 8 CPU cores at 3 GHz and 32G of RAM per server. That's a total of 16 CPU cores and 64G of RAM for aprs.fi alone! The memory really helps, as I can now fit more and more stuff in memory and avoid slow hard disk seeks. We found the blade server in a dumpster, so it's not the latest and greatest in the market, but certainly useful for a few more years.

I also upgraded the aprs.fi server software with a few visible changes and several important features which are not directly visible to the end users.

The most visible change is that Dead Reckoning was enabled for all stations which have moved recently. If the station has moved within the past 30 minutes, a blue line will be displayed, indicating where the station would be right now, assuming it has continued on the same course and speed.

For stations which transmit quite often in relation to their speed, or do not turn quickly (ships, airplanes and high-altitude balloons, for example), the DR'ed position will be surprisingly accurate. For cars driving a very curved road (in the city) it will be less accurate, but the DR line still provides an indication on the relative age, speed and usefulness of the displayed position. Your internal non-artificial algorithm can easily figure that the car probably turned along the road, even if the blue line ends in a forest.

The blue line becomes gradually more translucent during the first 10 minutes after the reception of the position report. If it's almost completely translucent, the position is more than 10 minutes old and both the DR'ed position and the displayed old position are pretty outdated. This information can be very useful, too.

It can take a small while until everyone gets used to the DR lines. After having them for a couple months on my development server I can assure you that they really improve the usefulness of the real-time map view!

Ham::APRS::DeviceID module was upgraded to version 1.05, adding detection for a number of new APRS devices: TrackPoint, BPQ32, ircDDB Gateway, DIXPRS, dsDIGI, dsTracker, DireWolf, MiniGate, YAAC, and MotoTRBO. New version of the module will appear on the CPAN soon.


Fixed calendar date selection in the data export tool.


Implemented a nice user and team management web UI (for administrator use only). Especially useful when running the software in a closed "intranet" mode.


Gave a face lift for the service management command line tools.


Web server software was upgraded (as usual).


I've also implemented TETRA LIP position packet decoding and support for Google Maps Enterprise licensing. More on that later!

aprs.fi presentation in Friedrichshafen, Ham Radio 2012

I'll be giving a lecture titled Advanced tricks and new features of aprs.fi at Ham Radio 2012, Friedrichshafen.

In this session I will demonstrate usage of advanced aprs.fi features beyond basic callsign lookup. New features and plans for the future will be announced.

The session will end with a Questions & Answers section and discussion. There should be plenty of time for that.

Time: Saturday, 23 June 2012, 14:00, about 1 hour + discussion
Place: Room/Raum Paris

Beware, it's a 15-minute walk from the center of the fun. The place is huge, so distances are noticeable.

It's not listed in the official program yet, since I got the idea of doing a presentation a bit late and the program had already been sent to be printed, but the organizers managed to find a room for us. Thank you Thilo! Since it's not in the official program, please let other APRS folks know about it when you bump into them on Friday. Thanks!

aprs.fi connected directly to aprs2.net hubs

I'm happy to announce that aprs.fi has tonight been directly connected to all of the APRS Tier 2 Network hubs. Two frontend servers, APRSFI-C1 and APRSFI-C2, are now connected with read-only connections to the five T2 hubs (T2HUB1 to T2HUB5), which act as the backbone of the aprs2.net network. This should provide a very stable and trouble-free connection between aprs.fi and the APRS-IS network.

Before this change aprs.fi was connected to a single APRS-IS server (usually T2FINLAND) and collected packets from that server alone. That server, in turn, is connected to a single T2 hub. Sometimes that connection could have some trouble and be disconnected for a few minutes, causing some packets to be lost. Recently a misconfiguration within the T2 network caused intermittent but severe packet loss for a few users for a long time. Having redundant, parallel connections to all of the servers should provide aprs.fi with copies of all packets even if some parts of the network have issues.

The fact that aprs.fi was usually connected to T2FINLAND also caused many users to prefer that server, which in turn caused a high load to the single server. Also, if that server would have had a hardware failure, all of those users would have lost connectivity to the APRS-IS. aprs.fi would have automatically switched to another server. Right now, T2FINLAND has 210 clients connected, while most other servers only have 30 to 100 clients. The Tier 2 network currently has a total of 4005 clients connected to the 86 servers in 31 countries.

If you're using T2FINLAND (finland.aprs2.net), or if you have configured your server to connect to any other single server, please reconfigure your system to use one of these Regional Rotate Addresses:

Europe and Africa: euro.aprs2.net
Asia: asia.aprs2.net
North America: noam.aprs2.net
South America: soam.aprs2.net
Oceania: aunz.aprs2.net

Check out the map of T2 servers and the rotate address distribution on the aprs2.net home page!

All of the regional rotate addresses will make your client connect to one of the nearly servers which have recently been automatically tested to be available and working. When that server fails, your client will automatically connect to some other server. All of the servers will provide equally good connectivity to aprs.fi. Starting tonight, T2FINLAND is not better in that respect than any of the others.

I repeat: Do not connect to finland.aprs2.net. If you're in europe, use euro.aprs2.net instead. T2FINLAND's server hardware will eventually break (we found it in the dumpster), and your igate or client software might be disconnected for a long time until someone gets to fix the server. Unless, of course, you use a regional rotate address, in which case you'll be automatically rerouted to a working server.

Thanks to all the Tier 2 operators for making this possible!

Linking parameters fixed and proper "Show all" button

The "others" and "timerange" parameters described on the Linking page should now work again. They were broken since the anchor navigation upgrade. Thanks to Oba JA7UDE for the bug report!

To properly fix how the "others" parameter  works I also added a new "Show all" button which is now quite a bit more  sensible than the old "Show all" link:

• The button is disabled and greyed out when it really doesn't do anything (like, when you're not tracking a station and all stations are displayed anyway)
• "Show all" can now be toggled between on and off, not just on
• The button visually indicates whether it's on or off (depressed or not)

Real-time telemetry and graph value lookup

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.