watch-aprs

Monitor and decode APRS packets arriving on a KISS-over-TCP device.

This is a command-line utility that decodes APRS packets and prints them out to the console in more-or-less human-readable form. It's useful with ports that have been made available by the share-tnc utility, or with ports that directly implement KISS-over-TCP, like the Direwolf sound card interface.

Hardware/Software Environment

watch-aprs uses 'node.js'. It has been tested most heavily on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Jessie, but has been casually tested on Windows 10, Linux Mint and MacOS Sierra, and appears to work fine. Please file a report if you experience difficulties.

Installation

If you need to use 'sudo' to install globally, use the following:

sudo npm install -g watch-aprs

If you don't need 'sudo', then

npm install -g watch-aprs

Usage

Command Line - Monitoring the On-Air APRS Traffic

watch-aprs <host>:<port>

e.g.

watch-aprs raspberrypi:8001

'watch-aprs' isn't specific to the 'share-tnc' package. It will work with any KISS-over-TCP server (e.g. DireWolf).

Contributing

To contribute, please fork https://github.com/trasukg/watch-aprs and then submit pull requests, or open an issue.

See also https://github.com/trasukg/utils-for-aprs for the underlying components used in this utility.

License

This software is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0

The phrase APRS is a registered trademark of Bob Bruninga WB4APR.

Release Notes

1.0.1 - December 21, 2017 - First release. Previously was a part of the share-tnc package. Releasing separately allows installation of watch-aprs without the serialport package.
1.0.2 - December 8, 2019 - Update to latest utils-for-aprs.