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