APRS stands for A utomatic P osition R eporting S ystem. It has many many facets and uses.

1. What IS APRS APRS stands for Automatic Position Reporting System. It has many many facets and uses. Mac/WinAPRS is a program for utilizing mapping and GPS technology along with Ham radio (packet) for use in tracking real time geographically related information such as the location of vehicles or the status of weather.

2. Key Features • Supports all standard Packet Radio TNCs • Supports several types of map data • Mac/WinAPRS map format • Precission Mapping CD-ROM (Windows only) • DEM (Digital Elevation Model) image files from USGS • GeoTiff image files • Standard GPS input (NMEA) • Built in data bases including zip codes and airports • Supports all standard callbook CD-ROMs for lookup of call signs

3. Quick Start MacAPRS requires System 7 or later WinAPRS will run on Windows 3.1, Windows95, or WindowsNT, it will NOT run on OS/2 For Windows 3.1, Win32S is REQUIRED Supports HF, VHF and dual mode TNCs for VHF and HF input Supports weather station input Supports GPS input Supports RDF (Radio Direction Finding) input Supports DosAPRS maps as well as the Mac/WinAPRS map format

4. MacAPRS™ and WinAPRS™ are very similar. There are some feature differences but nothing major. The intent was to make both versions as full featured as possible. There are some things on the Mac that are not easily accomplished on the Windows platform that will never get implemented (such as the speech output of messages).

5. The APRS family of software has many uses and is many different things to different people. APRS can be used for Tracking moving vehicles Tracking yourself as you drive around Fox hunts Keeping track of weather conditions Watching propagation There are many little things about APRS that users, both new and and old, get caught up on, these include path settings (WIDE, GATE, etc), and the use of gateways (HF to VHF and VHF to HF).

6. Originally the settings for WinAPRS would have been dramatically different from what was done for MacAPRS, this is due to the vastly different implementation of dialogs for Windows versus the MacOS. The software was written with the ability to read MAC dialog and out put Windows dialog. This made the conversion dramatically easier and made the dialog boxes for both versions practically identical. Under the SETTINGS menu there are several different settings dialog boxes. They may not be in this order. CONFIGURATION

7. Home Page Map What you see when you start the program

8. Settings Tab

9. Station Settings Who you are, Where you are

10. WinAPRS Settings Timing, logging, proximity alarms

11. Setting up the serial ports

12. TNC Type Selection

13. Specific TNC Settings

14. Position Report Rates How many How often Alternate Paths

15. Maps Selection Dialog

16. RELAY – Only use as first entry in path WIDE – Should only appear once as first or second entry WIDEn-n – Should only appear once as first or second entry TRACEn-n –For temporary experimentation only GATE – Means “gate packet to HF” NOGATE, RFONLY – Mean “don’t gate to Internet” TCPIP, TCPXX, qXX – APRS-IS only APRS Path Settings

17. Mobile – RELAY,WIDE or RELAY,WIDE2-2 Portable – RELAY,WIDE or RELAY,WIDE2-2 Fixed – DIGICALL, DIGICALL,WIDE or DIGICALL,WIDE2-2 Digis – No path Special Events – RELAY or RELAY,WIDE Airmobile – WIDE or WIDE2-2 Recommended Paths

18. Mobile – 3 minutes minimum, SmartBeacon preferred with 3 minute minimum Portable – 10 minute minimum, 20 minute preferred Fixed – 20 to 30 minutes Weather – 10 minute minimum, 15 minute preferred Airmobile – 5 minute minimum Recommended Beacon Rates

19. Parts of this presentation have been Used with permission from the WINAprs Software creators Mark and Keith Sproul

20. Mark Davis KD5WIN MarkBDavis@earthlink.net Q&A