[aprssig] UP 3985 Steam Train tracker question

[Curt, WE7U]

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 rcluster at rgisp.com wrote:

> The cool thing is the UP has installed a tracker on the train. You can get
> it's updated position on their website:
>
> <http://www.uprr.com/aboutup/excurs/trace.cfm>
>
> Now for the APRS part of this message......
>
> I can find the Lat/Long numbers on the website if I get "Properties" for
> the map. Looks like this (all on one line):
>
> /opt_wms/MapImage.jas?cLat=41.221771240234375&cLon=-111.97998809814453&extLon=25&extLat=25&imgW=560&imgH=420&rtMinExt=1.0&dbPool=upPool&units=UP3985
>
> Any of you have the programming skills to write something that will
> automatically extract this info every couple of minutes and create an APRS
> object that could be placed into the APRS-IS system? It could then be
> gated to RF by a few iGate operators which would put the current train
> location on the maps of mobile APRS users.

If it's easy enough to snag the line above automatically, a quick
Perl script could munge this into an APRS object and dump it into
the inet stream.  Several people on the APRSSIG list are capable of
writing this.

I have Perl scripts already that inject packets, so if someone can
do a quick look to find out how to snag the text string from the web
site, I could do the rest.  If someone doesn't beat me to it!

How many days is this excursion?

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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