[aprssig] APRS web messaging

[scott at opentrac.org]

I've thought about offering that sort of service, but the user interface
might get complicated.  I'm afraid I've only got a limited amount of time to
spend supporting non-paying stuff these days.  If enough people were
interested in paying maybe $5/month for access to a professionally developed
and maintained APRS/AVL site with lots of cool features, I might consider
it.

Seems like there's not a lot of development going on out there.  I have high
hopes for OpenAPRS.net, but while it does a good job of displaying the Napa,
CA area it's really hit-or-miss when it comes to making it do anything else.
Enter N1VG-1 (in Firefox) and nothing happens.  Type K6TZ-10 (in IE) and
Santa Barbara pops up, with no stations.  Javascript errors are constant.
Looks cool, but it's not quite there yet.  I hope they get it working better
one of these days.

I wrote a parser service a while back that'd pipe the APRS-IS stream into an
Oracle Spatial database, and it did an excellent job with spatial queries.
You could return all stations within Santa Barbara County, stations within
.25 miles of Interstate 40 in Oklahoma and Texas only, stations more than 40
miles from a digi, or whatever.  Very quick, very stable, and very scalable
- and there's absolutely no way I could afford the Oracle licensing if it
wasn't a pay service.

Maybe one of the open source (or more affordable commercial) databases can
match the spatial capabilities now, but I'd still be more comfortable
managing a high-traffic, multi-gigabyte database in Oracle than anything
else.

And then there's the issue of maps.  I'm not sure what Google's terms are
these days, but I know they've got limits.  If you want to serve high
quality map data to large numbers of users, chances are you're going to be
paying someone for it.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic.  Yeah, I'm working on some cool stuff.  For
now a lot of it's going to be focused on features specific to my hardware -
telemetry and control, remote configuration, and so on - and I'll do what I
can to make it useful to the APRS community at large, but I'm a bit
constrained right now.

Scott
N1VG

> -----Original Message-----
> From: aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org 
> [mailto:aprssig-bounces at lists.tapr.org] On Behalf Of Tyson S.
> Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 10:57 PM
> To: TAPR APRS Mailing List
> Subject: RE: [aprssig] APRS web messaging
> 
> If your going to start making cool APRS stuff on the web I 
> would really
> love to have something that I could set up certain criteria and have
> the notifications sent to email addresses of my choice. For example I
> would like to have geographic regions pre configured, sort of like the
> filter string on the filtered aprs-is ports, a square made up by the
> upper left hand and lower right hand lat long. I could make 
> this square
> any size I want and as many as I want. If I made a square around the
> local Wal Mart parking lot then the criteria would be to send an email
> to my wife's cell phone that says simply "N7ZMR-7 at Wal Mart" when my
> D7A beaconed from within that box (maybe the lat long of the 
> pos too?).
> I could make another square that was as big as the county or even the
> country and have it send only one email per x=time of my choice. So if
> I started my tracker after I get off work then a notification would be
> sent that I have started the tracker somewhere within my huge box and
> the receiving person could go get on findu and see whats up. 
> Additional
> transmissions would be ignored until the time I chose expired. The
> possibilities could be endless.
> 
> --- scott at opentrac.org wrote:
> 
> > I'm an ARRL member and I don't have an arrl.org email 
> account.  Maybe
> > something in the welcome materials when I (re)joined said something
> > about
> > it, but I don't recall.  I'm willing to bet many (most?) 
> ARRL members
> > don't
> > have one set up either.  And even if I didn't mind it being
> > US-centric, I
> > still wouldn't want to limit it to ARRL users, or for that matter
> > show any
> > bias towards those who are members.
> >  
> > I suppose I could make it manual - require a QSL card or 
> photocopy of
> > a
> > license.  It'd require manual intervention, but at least I'd have a
> > heck of
> > a QSL card collection, and it'd be great for my son's stamp
> > collection!  =]
> >  
> > Scott
> > N1VG
> 
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