APRSGateway Greatly Enhanced in W0CHP-PiStar-Dash
(Skip directly to the demo video…)
The Problem
Andy (MW0MWZ), the author of Pi-Star has been slowly rolling out new features
that track Jon’s (G4KLX) contributions to the ham community, namely,
APRSGateway (as well as DGIdGateway, etc.).
However, while the core binaries, skeletal configurations, etc. are slowly (and
arguably systematically) rolled out in Andy’s Pi-Star updates, one must
essentially hand-edit config files to enable/disable or change these services;
specifically APRSGateway.
A Solution (Kind Of)
I’ve seen a solution from another Pi-Star fork developer (a very talented one,
I might add), where once you click to enable APRSGateway, it automatically
enables it for all modes/protocols you also have enabled. So if you have
multiple modes running on your hot-spot, you’d be sharing APRS data with all
of those enabled modes.
Another caveat with this solution: Hand-edit a config file to disable APRS on a certain mode, it will get wiped out the next time you hit “Apply” in the configuration screen and become re-enabled.
Now, while this is somewhat compelling and simple solution, but I wanted
something better for both me, as well as users of
W0CHP-PiStar-Dash – something that would
give us control of our APRS data.
So at 4am, I began hacking and coding…
THE Solution!
In all seriousness…
Users can now select/deselect modes to which they wish to share APRS data with. It’s so easy to use.
To show you how this works and how intuitive it is, here’s yet another terrible quality demo video by yours truly: