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iR-APRSISD

Garmin/DeLorme inReach (or possibly other) KML feed to APRS-IS forwarding daemon

Hwaet!

This is a KML-feed to APRS-IS forwarding daemon. It was written for Garmin/DeLorme inReach devices, but might work elsewhere too. It polls a KML feed in which it expects to find a point in rougly the form that the inReach online feeds use, with attendant course, speed, and elevation data. It synthesizes an APRS position report for each point found there, complete with course, speed, and elevation data, and sends it to APRS-IS. If the packet came with an attached SMS message (this happens when you send a message to "mapshare" from your device), the text from that message is included in the APRS comment field.

This makes it possible to track an Iridium-based satellite device, say, on aprs.fi with all of the amateur radio stuff. All you need is a machine -- with the aprslib Python module installed -- attached to the internet to run the daemon, and a device that's publishing a KML feed.

Set up of Garmin Mapshare

In order to use this software, you must have a KML feed that gets location information from your device. Garmin can be told to publish it for you if you have an inReach. Roughly, the KML feed is available on the "social" tab of your Garmin account. You'll probably need to enable Mapshare. You can set a password or not. if you do set one, you will need to provide this password in the configuration file or on the command line to access your feed. Once it's turned on, you can click the "feed" link to see the feed URL and a few other things.

Set up of the forwarding daemon

First, download the files here to your Unix machine of choice. Just cloning the repository would do fine. You must have or be willing to get Python 3 and the Python aprslib. Most new enough installs will have Python 3. With luck, you may be able to install aprslib with something like:

pip3 install aprslib

... or:

pip install aprslib

Then do these things:

  • Edit the configuration file to contain your inReach username, your APRS SSID, and your APRS-IS passcode. Make any other changes you see fit.

  • Optionally, install the config file in /etc. You can otherwise leave it in the current directory.

  • Run the daemon. It should begin to scan your KML feed.

Note: I thought about just automatically calculating an APRS passcode rather than requiring it in the configuration, but this would be pretty catastrophic in case of typographical errors. If you don't already have the correct passcode, there is a command-line option, --genpass, that will calculate it for you. At least this way, the software will print the SSID for which you've asked it to generate a code back to you, and you're likely to notice if it's not actually yours. If it is yours, you can just cut and paste the code into the configuration. Hopefully this prevents me from encouraging people to use SSIDs which should be assigned to other stations. You can generate a passcode like this:

ir-aprsisd --genpass --ssid N0CALL-66

If you leave out the ssid option, a passcode will be generated for the SSID in the APRS section of the configuration file.

Multiple inReach devices

Support is now included for multiple inReach devices on the same feed. There are a few strategies for dealing with multiple devices. I do not have a way to test it on my own, but it has been tested and I'm told it works. I will do my best not to break it in an update. You can do any one of the following things:

  • Just define a single SSID in the configuration file, leave the Devices section undefined, and the software will increment the number on your SSID for each new IMEI it finds in the feed. Mappings generated this way will be consistent within a single run, but may -- or may not -- change if you run the service again.

  • Still define the SSID in the APRS section, since it's used for the APRS gate address and the login to APRS-IS, but also define the Devices section. Each line should have an SSID = IMEI mapping. All devices not present in the Devices section will be ignored.

  • Run multiple instances of the daemon, each with an IMEI specified on the command-line, or each with a new configuration file and a Devices section that includes some but not all of the devices you want to watch.

If you have multiple inReach devices, that should get them all tracking.