[aprssig] APRS-IS and metadata

[Borja Marcos]

Hi,

I am new to the list, I hope this is the right place to discuss this issue. This is not a complete proposal, of course,
just a “weather balloon” ;)

As many members will be aware, there is an effort underway to use LoRa modulation on 433 MHz for
APRS. There are several open source projects which, as a plus, are based on dirt cheap and easy to obtain
hardware,

https://github.com/richonguzman/LoRa_APRS_Tracker
https://github.com/dl9sau/TTGO-T-Beam-LoRa-APRS
https://github.com/lora-aprs/LoRa_APRS_iGate

There is also one commercial product available, picoAPRS LoRa. It is more pricey, but, well, all of us know
that developing and supporting an actual product is hard.

http://www.db1nto.de/index_en.php

All of it is a bit ad-hoc now with no agreed standards (as far as I know). While some of the developers have
agree informally to use APL?? device IDs for LoRa based equipment, not every developer is following that
rule, 

As far as I know there are also other modems/phys used with APRS. For example VARA on HF.

I think it would be great to add some metadata to the databses used by the APRS mapping applications including,
as a minimum, a modem/phy identification (and frequency, which could be useful for HF) so that they can be
more useful to study/check certain kinds of APRS activity. 

Right now, for example, there are dashboards relying just on APL??? device IDs. 

http://lora.ham-radio-op.net/?center=43.3508,-3.0499&zoom=12

Another interesting possibility offered by a more flexible database model could be adding some metadata specific
to certain modems. As an example, LoRa chips can provide RSSI and SNR data which could prove valuable for 
propagation/coverage studies.

What do you think?


73,


Borja Marcos / EA2EKH