A German Handbook, an ADIF Download, and a Map on Every QSO

The last week has been the busiest yet. When I filed Leaderboards, Achievements, and a New Dashboard eight days ago, aprsota.org/stats showed 1,562 QSOs from 174 operators in 23 countries. As I write this it shows 4,897 QSOs from 234 operators in 24 countries. By the time most of you read this, we will have crossed 5,000 QSOs.

Two apps added features specific to APRS OTA last week, APRS Connect on Android and Radio Messenger on iOS. Welcome to everybody who found us through them, and thank you to the developers of both.

Here is everything that has been deployed since Leaderboards, Achievements, and a New Dashboard.

The handbook in German, and as a PDF

In addition to being viewable on the website, you can download the entire handbook as a PDF, which is great for taking into the field where you may not have internet access. Grab it from the handbook introduction, or straight from aprsota.org/handbook.pdf.

The handbook is also now available in German at aprsota.org/de/handbook, with a language picker at the bottom of every page. The German is machine drafted and has not been proofread yet. Thanks to Peter DL7PJ for his initial work to push this along. If you would like to see the handbook in your language, or can help check a language we already have, please get in touch. You don’t have to translate the entire handbook, just review and correct the machine generated translation.

While the handbook will be (hopefully) available in many languages, the commands and the bot’s replies stay in English, both on the air and in the handbook. You will always send CHASE K7ABC and the bot will answer Now chasing K7ABC-6 DN40fb. The handbook description of how the CHASE command works will be translated.

A map on every QSO page

As mentioned last week, every QSO page now shows a map of just the two stations. Here is K7III working OH6DVF.

Download your log as ADIF

Your logbook at aprsota.org/YOURCALL/qsos now has a Download ADIF button at the bottom of the table. It writes a standard .adi file that any logging program will import, and it has been tested uploading to QRZ.

Any filters you have applied on the web page will also control what is downloaded in the file, so you can pull just one year, or just the ops you hosted, or just your chases.

Better lake data

We now have more accurate lake data, and therefore more accurate Nessie stamps. Previously, OH6DVF’s home street in Jyväskylä was described as being in the middle of Lake Päijänne.

The old lake data dissolved connected lake systems into single polygons, towns and land corridors included. Its Päijänne was 4,197 square kilometers against the real 1,083, and it swallowed four towns. Its Saimaa was more than twice its real size and held Savonlinna and Varkaus. Because a chaser’s location is resolved on every single chase, one station inside a blob like that minted Nessie on every contact it ever made.

The lake data now comes from HydroLAKES, and includes 17,436 lakes worldwide. Every lake of 10 square kilometers or more is described in the new dataset, plus every named lake of 1 square kilometer or more. Shorelines are 20 times more accurate than the previous data, improving resolution from kilometers to approximately 55 meters.

In this new dataset, some names read differently. The new names don’t have accents and often don’t include “Lake”, so you will see “Michigan”, “Great Salt”, and “Paijanne”. Many smaller lakes carry no name at all and get a generic label. I decided the dramatically better outline of the lakes was worth the tradeoff for plainer names.

All Nessie stamps and their associated points earned before this switch remain as they were when the QSO was completed.

Position reports that were being ignored

Several operators reported similar problems this week. Send a CHASE, send a position report, and nothing happens. Send a second position report and that one works. One was using Radio Messenger on iOS, the other an AnyTone 878 into a DMR hotspot.

I found and fixed this bug. A position report can carry a timestamp from the sending station’s own clock, truncated to the whole minute. APRS OTA was reading that timestamp as the time the packet arrived. If you sent your CHASE and your beacon in the same minute, your beacon looked like it had been sent before the chase it belonged to, and the chase window ignored it. This same problem occurred if you sent a HOST message and a position report.

The time a packet arrived is now always the time we received it, what the sender claims is kept separately, and the first position report after a CHASE or HOST should be properly recognized.

There is a related issue, which I hope to fix this week. If you send a HOST via RF, and your position report arrives via APRS-IS, the bot doesn’t tell you that your position report doesn’t meet the criteria to start an op. I’m going to make it more helpful.

When is the service busy

The home page and aprsota.org/now have always shown which ops are on the air now and a few recently completed ops. But they haven’t been able to tell you what times of day the most people are on the air. There are two new charts, each shown in two places, which give you this information:

• aprsota.org/stats#time-of-day
• aprsota.org/now.

These charts show what happened each hour over the last 7 days. One shows the average number of ops on the air during that hour, the other shows the average number of QSOs completed during that hour. You can show the hours in Zulu, or switch it to show in your local time with one click.

Going quiet, a bigger server, and backups

The service needs occasional maintenance that cannot be done while it is running. Rather than cutting ops off mid-air, APRS OTA can now go quiet, which means new ops cannot start while everything already on the air runs to its natural end.

While it is going quiet, everything else works. Chasers can still chase you, you can still QSL them, BLAST still reaches your op, STAY still adds 30 minutes, and your contacts are still logged and scored. PLAN is not affected either, and a plan whose time falls inside the window is still waiting for you afterwards. A banner on the site says the same thing the bot does. There is a handbook page about it at aprsota.org/handbook/going-quiet.

Once quiet, I can safely take the service down to do things like operating system patches or upgrades, without interrupting an op or a half-completed QSO.

I used the going quiet feature this week to take the service down and upgrade to a more powerful server with more memory. The database containing all the ops and QSOs now streams continuously to a second server in another location, and is backed up again every hour.

Smaller things

• You can leave the SSID off CHASE and QSL. CHASE K7ABC finds the same op as CHASE K7ABC-6, and QSL W1XYZ confirms the same contact as QSL W1XYZ-5. Only the far station’s SSID is optional. Yours still has to match, because we have to know which of your radios is talking. This saves you two or three characters on every message you thumb into a handheld.
• The chase receipt now tells you where the host is. It reads Now chasing K7ABC-6 DN40fb, with the host’s grid square.
• BLAST limits went up. People really like to use blasts, and my initial guesses at the rate limits were too low. I’ve doubled the limits, see the BLAST command reference for all the details.
• Blasts show up on the op page without a reload. The live refresh was updating everything else on that page and quietly skipping them.

What’s next

August achievements get awarded in a few days. Once August is over, the first batch of achievements will be awarded to everybody who finished the month on a leaderboard. Have a look at where you stand at aprsota.org/leaderboards while there is still time to move.

After that, more leaderboards and more achievements. I really want to build an Elmer stamp and leaderboard, awarding points and recognizing operators who complete QSOs with hosts running their first couple of ops. I also want to figure out how to give more points to QSOs that are part of a pileup on an op.

Comments, suggestions, bug reports, and packet logs are always welcome.

• Email: jared@k0tfu.org
• Discord: APRS OTA