North Alabama

APRS Internet Gateway

The N8DEU-5 Internet Gateway (IGate)

The local APRS Internet Gateway is located at Decatur, Alabama

The Gateway has proven to be very effective in handling local and international APRS traffic. There have been many times I have traveled around the country and sent messages via APRS very quickly to local users. It also provides support for sending National Weather Service messages to the local APRS community to spread the warnings and watches as the weather develops in real time. It is amazing to watch the counties hi-light with red or yellow colors to visually show the affected areas along with the associated weather bulletins.

I was listening to the local SKYWARN take check-ins during an impending storm condition. It took a long time to check all these people into the Net. If they only had APRS, it could have taken less than 2 minutes to check-in all these people, considering it could take as little as 1 second per person to send their message. Then, we would not have to ask all the weather spotters where they were located, because we would see them on the map. We just need to implement the technology to meet our needs.

There are some additional functions and features that the local gateway provides:

International APRS coverage

NWS weather bulletins

EMAIL functions

Messaging between APRS users

Call Book server

Call Book Name Lookup

Message storage and retrieval

Positional Status reports

How to send Email via APRS

Yes, you can send massages from APRS to Internet EMAIL.

There are 2 choices. One is to use the WU2Z EMAIL server. The second choice is the javAPRSSrvr support via javAPRSEmail.

The EMAIL (WU2Z)  Method

Send a message address to EMAIL instead of a callsign. In the message, the Internet Email address should appear first followed by a space and the message you wish to send. For example, I would type the following message to send an Email to myself using an APRS station, "[email protected] this is a test message".  That is all there is to it. The WU2Z EMAIL server will acknowledge receipt of the message and it will return a message, "Email message delivered OK", in response if the message was delivered properly.

The EMAIL-2 (javAPRSEmail) Method

Call Book Server

Messages can be addressed to WHO-IS for call sign lookup services.

The message can contain the following entries:

callsign

f callsign

If the callsign you are searching is preceded with an "f" (for full information) followed by a space a multi line message will be returned with more detail like the callsign, name, class, street address, city, state, and country. without the "f" 

WHO-IS is a javAPRSQRZ application.

This page was last updated on 21-Aug-2013