[aprssig] APRS-IS and metadata

[Borja Marcos]

> On 18 Aug 2023, at 00:26, Scott Miller <scott at opentrac.org> wrote:
> 
> Please no! Let's stop doing that without some planning and coordination. There are so many (sometimes incompatible) little extensions out there. I'm guilty of introducing a number of them myself.
> 
> I'm experiencing that all again with EchoLink right now, having to capture packets and pick them apart and figure out that to this client, this field means this but only if this other field is zero, but to another client that's something else, unless maybe it saw the other end use a field differently and then it changes...

Sorry about the very belated answer. Real job being really busy lately!

First, of course I am discussing it here in order to achieve planning and coordination. Not planning to do anything unilaterally!

When I talk about metadata I mean metadata stored into the backend databases, that should be supplided by the iGates. Maybe it would be time
to define a new mechanism now that at least LoRa-APRS is reasonably young and there are still few developers. 

I have been using the syslog output of my iGate as a sidechain and I can certainly obtain some interesting data. Notably RSSI and SNR supplied
by the LoRa chips, which can help do experiments like comparing antennas, etc.

This is an example syslog output:

picoAPRS at 0 dBm but less than 1 metre away from the antenna,

<7>1 - EA2EKH-10 RadiolibTask - - - [16:00:16] Received packet 'Source: EA2EKH-15, Destination: APPIC4-1, Path: , Type: Status, Data: >ea2ekh at gmail.com' with RSSI -36dBm, SNR 12.00dB and FreqErr 11409.817383Hz

picoAPRS 1 - 2 Km awa2 with no line of sight 
<7>1 - EA2EKH-10 RadiolibTask - - - [10:10:40] Received packet 'Source: EA2EKH-15, Destination: APPIC4-1, Path: , Type: Status, Data: >ea2ekh at gmail.com' with RSSI -121dBm, SNR -16.00dB and FreqErr 11249.910156Hz

From here it is trivial to extract that information and store it into a modern non structured database such as ElasticSearch. If decoding coordinates it can help build coverage maps with RSSI and SNR data, for instance.

73,



Borja EA2EKH