Radiograms
RSSAnnouncements from the APRS OTA project: new features, milestones, notes from elsewhere, and stories from the field.
A German Handbook, an ADIF Download, and a Map on Every QSO
By the time most of you read this there will be more than 5,000 QSOs on APRS OTA. The handbook is now in German and downloadable as a PDF, every QSO page has a map, and your logbook downloads as ADIF. The lake data is more accurate, and I fixed a position report bug that affected several operators.
Radio Messenger adds APRS OTA support
Radio Messenger 1.0.3 is on the App Store with APRS OTA support built in. It carries a help card for the command syntax, it names the ham behind a chaser's callsign, and confirming a contact is a tap instead of a typed message.
APRS Connect launches with APRS OTA built in
APRS Connect is out on Google Play today. It is a full APRS client for Android with native APRS OTA support, including a host screen that lists your chasers and confirms each contact with a button.
Leaderboards, Achievements, and a New Dashboard
A month after launch there have been 1,562 QSOs from 174 operators in 23 countries, and 21 August is already the biggest day the service has had. Every command that takes a callsign now takes it the same way, seven leaderboards are live, a closed month awards achievements that keep, and the operator page has been rebuilt with its own logbook, op archive, and contact map.
WB2EHG on Discovering APRS OTA
Eric WB2EHG interviewed me and wrote up how he has been using APRS OTA, including reaching the bot over DMR through BrandMeister.
A Club Talk with an Op
The Daytona Beach Amateur Radio Association invited me to present APRS OTA at their August meeting, and we ran a live op as part of it.
Stats, and the Biggest Day Yet
The site has a stats page now with totals, a basic record book, and activity charts, refreshed hourly from the whole log. It went live today to report the biggest day OTA has had, 269 points from 123 QSOs across 24 ops, topped by an Austrian op from the Tyrol Alps.
STAY, and a Rule I Got Wrong
A new command for when an op is going well and you want more time, PING now tells you whether we heard you on RF, the RF rule spent nearly a month refusing hosts who were doing everything right, and there will be no database reset after all.
Plans and Blasts
Two new commands. PLAN announces an op before you go, so chasers know when to listen for you, and BLAST sends one message to everybody on your op at once.
Stamps and Combos
A real scoring system is built. Every point a contact earns now comes from a named stamp, combos give the best patterns of stamps their own name and artwork, and the whole thing is on display in the op logbook, on the QSO page, and on the QSL card.
Call for Testers
The bot is live and connected to APRS-IS, hosting, chasing, and QSOs work end to end, and the handbook and a new blog are up. Here's what else is built and how you can help test it.
The APRS OTA Proposal
The proposal that started it all, preserved from the original home page: bring the activator-and-chaser game to APRS, with a bot that connects operators and a website that logs every QSO live.