As I like photographing and hamradio I had the idea to combine both. Every day hams are sending APRS messages from all over the world, but all we see is a dot on a map. Isn’t that sad? Let’s show how it really looks where we do hamradio. Let’s show what’s behind the track on a map!

The idea is to take a photo and send a APRS beacon at the same place at the same time and post both on Twitter using the hashtag #aprsphoto.

I just started:

Storm flood at Elbe river after strong winds over the last days
JO4UN
Wedel near Hamburg#aprsphoto #aprs #hamradio #hamr@aprsfi pic.twitter.com/ZVfwcXD4hh

— DK3ML (@dk3ml) 27. Dezember 2016

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I am working with APRS a lot at the moment. I started a couple of months ago with almost no knowledge about this mode and now I have the feeling, I slowly understand it. Here are my 10 reasons, why APRS is a great mode!
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Since a couple of weeks I am running a APRS RX-igate on a Raspberry PI with RTL-SDR dongle and pymultimonaprs. To show on the map that it’s a RX-only Igate it’s recommended to set the black diamond with a “R” overlay as a symbol. To do this you have to use “R” as table and “&” as a symbol.

Here is my configuration:

"beacon": {
"lat": ...,
"lng": ...,
"table": "R",
"symbol": "&",
"comment": "PyMultimonAPRS iGate",
"status": {
"text": "Raspberry PI - RX Igate",
"file": false
},

Since a couple of days I was trying to get my mobilinkd bluetooth tnc running with Xastir on Ubuntu 16.04. As root it was working, but as a normal user I was not able to connect with Xastir. Today I finally found the solution. Thanks to all my twitter followers who helped me finding the reason and solve the issue.
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I was asked a couple of times about the APRS settings on the FT1-XDE, so I decided to list them here with some comments. Maybe it’s useful for somebody else.

To open the APRS settings, press [DISP] for a second and chose menu 9 (APRS) and press [ENT]

If you just want to start quickly, here are the basic settings:

4) APRS Modem: 1200bps
15) BEACON STATS TXT: 73
16) BEACON TX: manual
18) DIGI PATH: WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1
20) GPS POWER: On
23) CALLSIGN: Put your callsign there
24) MY POSITION: GPS
25) MY SYMBOL: Whatever you want as a symbol

Now leave the APRS settings, switch VFO B to 144.800 (if this is the APRS frequency used in your country) and then press F + 9 (BCONTX) and you will send your first APRS beacon message.

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