[aprssig] APRS activity triggering a text or email notification via internet push

[Guido Trentalancia]

Hello Steve !

On Mon, 07/02/2011 at 22.19 -0600, Steve Hanis wrote:
> A friend and I just starting using APRS.  Is there way to trigger a SMS text
> message or email via Internet monitoring when his APRS goes active or moving?
> This would let me know he is mobile and available to chat or view his location
> on a map. My apologies if the question is too simplistic for this
> list, I am a newbie.
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve
> AB5ID

Suppose your friend has call AB4HB, then you could use something like:

FROMEMAILADDRESS=dmesteve at gmail.com
MYEMAILADDRESS=dmesteve at gmail.com
APRSCALLSIGN=AB4HB
SMTP_SERVER=smtp.ab5id.org
axlisten -a | grep -q " fm $APRSCALLSIGN to " && echo "An APRS packet
from $APRSCALLSIGN has been heard" > /tmp/aprs_message.txt && env
MAILRC=/dev/null from=$FROMEMAILADDRESS smtp=$SMTP_SERVER mailx -v -n -s
"Mail from APRS" $MYEMAILADDRESS < /tmp/aprs_message.txt && rm
-f /tmp/aprs_message.txt

Note that APRSCALLSIGN is case sensitive (unless you pass the -i option
to grep). Note that SMTP_SERVER needs to be defined according to your
actual smtp server.
Most importantly note that the above will send out an email message for
every packet that is received from APRSCALLSIGN and this might not be
desirable as there might be a lot of packets coming continuously (so you
might do things better with some extra code that checks whether a
message has already been sent recently, for example by creating a
temporary file each time a message is sent and then checking that the
timestamp of such file is not too recent before sending a new email
message).

Or otherwise you can download a tiny program that I wrote
(ax_emergency_listen) which is generally used to monitor APRS emergency
packets and adapt it to your needs (by modifying the C source code):

http://iz6rdb.trentalancia.com/en/aprs_igate.html

73,

Guido IZ6RDB