Saturday, May 11th, 2024

APRStoot
========

I was asked in  the guestbook by fellow HAM  KF7MIX to write something
about  my amateur radio activity.  To be honest,  there is not much to
write about,  because I am not very active at the moment.  My activity
in fact  peaked  long before  I even had my  HAREC license  and OK1ZXS
callsign. Here in the Czech Republic, we have quite a plethora of free
to use bands:  CB where FM,  AM, and SSB is allowed,  34 MHz,  77 MHz,
81 MHz, 172 MHz,  PMR446, 442 MHz  and 446 MHz. Although some of these
frequencies are used by commercial users,  on most there is a frequent
HAM activity, even though purely unlis one.  But people try to make DX
(there are even DX clubs),  there are regular contests (I've organized
three of these contests,  one was inspired by SOTA  and during the ten
years of its existence several hundred people attended),  etc. So when
I was in the college and had a lot of free time,  I was very much into
these free bands. I still have some diplomas and cups from this era.

Then I got  my license and discovered  that even though there are more
possibilities  on licensed bands,  you also need much  more equipment,
and time to actually achieve anything.  And I have neither.  On PMR446
you can take cheap a 0.5W "walkie-talkie" and during my contest called
Nov Contest, which takes place every  4th Wednesday of each month from
19:00 till 22:00 CET, make more than  80 QSO and if you are lucky some
of them will be  way above 200 km in lenght.  You can't do this in any
FM contest on the 70cm HAM band, because people with 50W, 100W or more
powerful rigs will always be stronger than you.

But there is actually one area of HAM radio,  that can't be replicated
easily on free bands - packet radio, like the APRS. Yes, we had packet
on CB in the 1990s,  but that is long dead.  Yes,  there is a new LoRa
network on free-band called Meshtastic[1], which is booming right now,
but it's limited by legislation  both in the transmitted power and the
duty cycle.

So I am into APRS, studying DAPnet,  occasionally doing some smalltalk
over the nearest  FM  or  C4FM repeater and for the time being, that's
about it.

Since 2019  I wrote several  server scripts to interact with the APRS,
and one  of them is  the APRStoot.  The idea  is based  on my previous
server-side app,  using which  you could  send me  a guestbook message
using APRS. I used it during ROOPLOCH 2020 and wrote about it here[2].
As I switched from  PHP  to  Python several years ago, I re-wrote this
script and as it was about the same time I started to use the Mastodon
social network,  I modified the script,  that it posts  everything  it
receives there,  instead of in a guestbook.  The code is - of course -
open-source[3].

So if you have an APRS-capable transceiver, you can send a direct APRS
message  to  OK1ZXS-15  and  it  will  be posted (a.k.a. "tooted")  on
APRStoot  account[4].  This combination  of HAM radio and computing is
what interests me most right now,  and I'm looking into other ways how
to merge them.  Other areas  of the vast  HAM universe  may or may not
follow.

[1] https://meshtastic.org/
[2] gopher://i-logout.cz/0/phlog/posts/2020-09-27_my_roophloch_2020_entry.txt
[3] https://github.com/logout128/aprstoot
[4] https://botsin.space/@aprstoot

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