[aprssig] APRS Newbie - Overwhelmed

[Michael Barnes]

I am wanting to get into APRS and am rapidly getting overwhelmed. My intent
is to have APRS in my vehicle to see stations around me and to allow my
home station to track me. I have a Raspberry Pi with touchscreen and TNC-Pi
connected to a Kenwood HT with external antenna for the truck. That station
will run Xastir. Most of the home monitoring I am assuming can be done with
a computer displaying aprs.fi.

I guess the first thing I am looking for is an APRS for Dummies guide to
help me get started. I'll need to figure out how to configure the mobile
for reporting or beaconing or whatever it does.

I'm also trying to make sense of aprs.fi. I see a ton of icons on the map,
but I have no idea what they all are. I am especially confused by a large
number of what seem to be non-ham entities on there. I am seeing fire
lookout towers, tug boats and Navy ships, what looks to be home weather
stations, aircraft, and others. Some of these show different identification
than ham callsigns, including aircraft numbers, marine and commercial
callsigns, and some kind of weather identifiers.

>From what I can gather, APRS depends on a lot of digipeaters to receive
data from mobile units and both relay that info to other users as well as
upload the data to the aprs.fi system, presumably via the Internet. I'm
trying to figure out how all that aspect functions as well.

Following the digipeater info is, what about areas out of range of a digi?
What are the procedures for putting a digi in place? Do folks have portable
digis that can be deployed temporarily to serve a non-covered area for a
specific event or emergency? Do all digis have to be connected to the
Internet?

As you can see, overwhelmed. I know this is a lot of questions. I probably
have a lot more, but I don't know enough yet to know what the questions
are. Thanks for your time in helping me get started.

73,
Michael WA7SKG
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