OTA bot commands

The OTA aprs service, or bot, responds to many commands.

The command is the first space delimited word in an APRS message you send to OTA. In this handbook, the commands are always shown in upper case, but they are not case-sensitive. Upper case, lower case, mixed case, it doesn’t matter.

Most commands take additional arguments after the command. Some of these arguments will be optional. The reference page for the command will have all the details.

All commands to the OTA bot are rate limited from your callsign regardless of SSID. This is done to prevent the OTA bot from being used in denial-of-service attacks, and because we all share the same slow bit rate over the airwaves. When you hit a rate limit the OTA bot will stop responding to your messages. The specific rate limits for each command are documented in that command.

There are bot commands which are only valid in certain contexts. For example, the DONE command, meaning I am done transmitting, is only valid if you are currently hosting an op. The first time you send a DONE to the OTA bot when you aren’t currently hosting an op, you’ll get a friendly hint telling you how to start one. If you send another DONE command, it will be ignored. You won’t get the hint again until 24 hours have passed since the last hint for the DONE command was sent to you.

Where a command’s usage says callsign | station, either works. INFO K7ABC and INFO K7ABC-6 ask about the same op, because OTA reads the callsign off the station. The one place the SSID matters is your own: the commands that run your op must come from the station that is running it.

Command Summary