After fiddling around with the SCS Tracker and talking to Mike OE3MZC there was some time to experiment with the RX side of the RPR APRS stuff. So why not have an iGate listening on QO-100 for APRS beacons in Robust Packet. Besides the hardware stuff there is also a software solution called WinRPR ([1]) which apparently is Windows only :-( But as I have a single Windows Box (running the QO-100 CW-Skimmer) I put WinRPR on there. The program is surprisingly easy to configure and run.
My WinRPR configuration (WinRPR_Config.txt) is as follows:
[PROGRAM]
WATERFALL:0
SMALLSIZE:0
[END]
[AUDIO]
RX:1
TX:1
[END]
[TCP]
TCPPORT:8001
[END]
[TNC]
#S 0
#I DF2ET-10
#A 1
#R 1
#%xr 400
#@K
[END]The parts regarding transmission and PTT where left out as this is a RX-only iGate. So this setup starts WinRPR and switches to TCP KISS mode after starting. The port to connect to is 8001. So with this it is relatively easy to decode APRS beacons in RPR on QO-100.
On the other hand it would be nice to deliver the APRS data to the APRS-IS to make it available for others. After looking through the software parts I stumbled accross an old friend: aprx. This digi software is capable of connecting to TCP KISS ports as WinRPR provides. A quick config tune lead to a working setup and is gating APRS beacons to the APRS-IS. The relevant config snippets are:
mycall DF2ET-10
<aprsis>
passcode xxxxx
server n18.de
</aprsis>
<logging>
pidfile /var/run/aprx.pid
rflog /var/log/aprx/aprx-rf.log
aprxlog /var/log/aprx/aprx.log
</logging>
<interface>
tcp-device 172.18.0.12 8001 KISS
callsign $mycall
tx-ok false
</interface>
<beacon>
beaconmode aprsis
beacon symbol "/`" lat "5129.63N" lon "00714.42E" comment "QO-100 RPR RX-only iGate RX: 10,489.581 MHz USB RPR300/FSK300"
beacon raw ">https://www.florian-wolters.de/posts/qo100_rpr_aprs_igate/"
</beacon>As backup for Mike’s iGate this setup is running and listening for APRS beacons in FSK300 and RPR300 mode on 10,489.581 MHz on QO-100 and gates the beacons to the APRS-IS
aprs.fi can display all the nice stuff. Besides the map view it can also display the telemetry part (see [2]). Obviously there is too much traffic at the moment :-)
This setup is running for 24h now and will be on for at least three weeks to test if I can report positions to the APRS-IS from OZ and SM. So check the info page of the iGate (see [3]) in the “Stations heard directly”-section from time to time. Happy experimenting and see you on APRS (via QO-100) ;-)
References
[1] https://vapn.org/news/winrpr-saving-robust-packet-from-oblivion.html
[2] https://aprs.fi/telemetry/a/DF2ET-10
[3] https://aprs.fi/info/a/DF2ET-10