Yaesu APRS woes

[mikedrom]

I just picked up a new FTM-300, walked through the manual, and watched a few YT videos of the APRS capabilities of the radio and how to set it up. My issue is that aprs.fi is not getting any of my beacons.

Here are some details:
- tx power on high (50w)
- made sure icon was set
- made sure call sign was entered
- antenna is outside in Denver, 5 miles from iGate, no obstructions
- red confirmation led lights up when transmitting beacon
- I am receiving beacons
- shortly after tx, I get a few “DE>’station call sign’” messages which I interpret to mean that those stations received my beacon (am I correct in this reasoning here?)
- edit to add: my beacons are not received on the FTM300–when I’m viewing the station list, mine is not present, which I find weird
- I searched my call sign on aprs.fi raw data and no packets are found

Any ideas?

 

[DaveInDenver]

Are you sure you're in range of an iGate? An APRS digital repeater (digipeater) is not always an iGate and vice versa.

Most iGates are receive-only, meaning they only listen for packets and put them onto APRS-IS.
Some iGates are bi-directional and will handle traffic both to and from the Internet,
Most digipeaters only repeat packets on the local network.
Some digipeaters are also iGates and those are the ones that usually do bi-directional traffic.

Point here is if you're hearing traffic you're in range of a digipeater (or at least other stations). But that only means you're for sure hearing on-the-air RF packet traffic on the local network.

To get to the APRS-IS (which means APRS Internet Service) you need an iGate to handle your packets. APS-IS is the backbone servers that handle APRS traffic over the Internet. APRS.fi is just a client of the APRS-IS servers.

APRS-IS

Authoritative home for APRS-IS descriptions and specifications

aprs-is.net

Now if an iGate is co-located with the digipeater you're hearing it, great, done.

But if it's not that means either an iGate needs to hear you directly or the digipeater needs to correctly repeat your packet so that it can. It's very likely if you're in range of a digipeater there will be an iGate in range of it somewhere.

So you may need to adjust your radio, modem or packet parameters to get everything working. Parameter would be the WIDE N-n stuff mainly.

The radio and modem (TNC) are internal to your Yaesu so there's not much you can do on that side beyond a good antenna and enough power, so we'll back burner that for now.

Do you know the identifier of the station you're 5 miles away from?

Where are you seeing the "DE>" message? Is that the log from your local client?

I turned on my APRS station here at the house and was looking through my logs and I don't see any that show "DE>callsign" so the only thing that comes to mind is maybe it's a response. Is the call sign yours or someone else's?

It's old ham tradition to abbreviate the statement "coming from" as "de", which actually dates back Morse Code operator days. It doesn't really mean anything but was chosen because it wasn't likely you'd have a "d" and "e" together in that order normally and it's a very quick. In Morse it's "-.. ." or a "dah 2 dits and a dits".

Ham Radio Glossary

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.

www.arrl.org

Point being it's become kind of an insider code to mean "from" when coding and design ham stuff. So "DE>W0XYZ" could be slang for "Heard from W0XYZ" or "Heard from BVILLE" and so knowing the call sign or station common name would be helpful in perhaps knowing what it means.

Normally what you see on the left of the carrot is the station name/call sign or hardware, like "W0XYZ>blahblah" or looking at your logs it may be the name of your TNC like "MODEM>blahblah" so I wonder if "DE" is something specific to Yaesu.

 

[mikedrom]

The nearest iGate is AC0XW-1, Digi and iGate.

Regarding the DE message, here’s what I’m referring to from the manual:

The call sign displayed is from a partner station, not my own.

Finally, the default for WIDE is set at WIDE 1-1, WIDE 2-1 from the factory. Here’s the blurb from the manual:

I’m thinking the next step to diagnose this is to drive next to the iGate and see if my house is in some kind of dead zone.

 

[DaveInDenver]

LOL, small world. One of your local stations is KE0VH. That's Jack, he's a friend of mine.

I understand the DE thing now. That's a Yaesu code and should be helpful.

So when you watch your radio is this changing? I'd expect you'd see weather, regular position (not MIC-E), new and other variations.

What do you hear audibly when you just listen on the speaker? It's pretty safe to assume that if you hear a lot of modem noise that when you transmit you *probably* can hit the digipeater. But it's always possible that you're in a RF shadow.

WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1 is fine. That should get you a couple of hops. Doesn't look like you can adjust it anyway and WIDE1-1 would not work well since it would only activate fill-in digipeaters (although it should activate AC0XW-1). You could use WIDE2-2 alone if you wanted or could but that would (or should) not activate AC0XW-1.

 

[mikedrom]

So the radio usually displays the two bands, but the B band is overlayed with the DE messages for a few seconds and then returns to displaying the B band again (which in this case is set to APRS). It’s pictured in the screenshot of the manual above; normally it’d display 144.390 just like the 432.500 is pictured in the A band.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Oh, something else I just thought of. Does this radio have a built-in GPS and has it gotten a fix? Without position data the packet may not be transmitted or it could be located in the wrong place. It's pretty common to see stations (or indeed yourself) sitting in the Gulf of Guinea west of Africa, which is lat,lon of <0,0>... You can sometimes also manually enter a location, which might be a troubleshooting step. It might take a variable out if the radio isn't transmitting a packet due to never getting a fix or not getting a low enough error fix.

 

[mikedrom]

Yup! GPS is on and working.

I just got one to work! Can’t say what I did differently, but it’s working now.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Yup! GPS is on and working.

I just got one to work! Can’t say what I did differently, but it’s working now.

Great!

Since you can pretty safely assume it's working technically the next step is to learn about how the network operates and how best to work within it. Over there APRS on RF is very busy so you'll want to read about collisions, delay, cycle time, decay rate, packet rate. Ask up if you're interested in how best to get a high success rate without flooding the network!

 

[DaveInDenver]

Doing some additional reading on this I think it's worth mentioning that this may be confusing to APRS and Yaesu users due to the use of angle bracket.

Using an example APRS packet taken from aprs.fi raw feed for the digipeater being used here.

2023-11-22 08:35:36 MST: AC0XW-1>APDW16,TCPIP*,qAC,T2SJC:!3949.46N110503.55W#Westy Fill-in Digi and IGate, https://AC0XW.TechSavage.net

In a parsed APRS packet the source or destination station is left of the bracket. So in this case AC0XW was the source station. To the right of the bracket is the parsed information that packet had.

But what Yaesu is displaying seems to be an internal status and call sign of heard station.

If anyone's interested the packet was parsed as follows.

The APDW16 is software and version number. APDW16 means the station is using Direwolf (APDW) version 1.6 (16).

Releases · wb2osz/direwolf

Dire Wolf is a software "soundcard" AX.25 packet modem/TNC and APRS encoder/decoder. It can be used stand-alone to observe APRS traffic, as a tracker, digipeater, APRStt gateway, or Inter...

github.com

Next is TCPIP*, which is a third party indicator for a packet received over APRS-IS. When doing APRS over the air this field will be something else.

The next field has qAC, which is part of the q-algorithm for packet routing. This indicates the packet came from a verified source, which is the call sign indicated after it.

That is T2SJC, which is a server on the APRS-IS network, specifically a tier 2 server used on a rotating basis. SJC is run by a volunteer most likely.

aprs2.net Status Monitor

This is how all iGates are going to look on APRS. Stations heard or direct RF will be different.

After that colon is the GPS location for AC0XW, 3949.46N110503.55W

And the end is a free text status message.

So a regular station packet.

2023-11-22 13:40:29 MST: KE0VH-2>T1TQTR,WY7HR-1,WIDE1*,WIDE2-1,qAO,WB7GR-10:`oTpr5lk/`"Bu}447.400MHz T103 -500 SkyHubLink.com, TEXT 4 FREQ 303-704-329_%

In this case the source was KE0VH-2.

T1TQTR means the station is using MIC-E encoding. You can parse it but those 6 digits contain a lot of data.

T1TQTR is 0x54 0x31 0x54 0x51 0x54 0x52

MIC-E uses the least significant byte of digits to make a latitude, so 414142 means 41° 41.42'

The most significant byte is parsed bit-wise but the APRS spec for MIC-E tells you by character what it means.

So:
T in digit one means message is 1
1 in digit two means message 0
T in digit three means message is 1
Q in digit four tells you N/S is north
T in digit give is longtitude offset and is +100°
R in digit six tells you W/S and is west

So we know this station is status 101 and that's message two (M2) and "In-Service" N41° 41.42' and W by at least 100°

To know exact longitude you have to decode the information field, which is the 9 digits [`oTpr5lk/] between the brackets.

[`oTpr5lk/] is [0x60 0x6f 0x54 0x70 0x72 0x35 0x6c 0x6b 0x2f] or [096 111 084 112 114 053 108 107 047]

First digit is data type and the tick (') means current GPS data
Second digit (o) is decimal 111°
Third digit (T) is 84 minutes
Fourth digit p is 112 seconds
Fifth, sixth and seventh are speed and course, (r5l) and pretty convoluted but it's 34 knots or 39 MPH. I'd have to work harder at getting the rest.
Eighth and ninth digits are symbol, (k/) is truck

So from those two fields we know MIC-E encoded "In-Service N41° 41.42' and W111° 84.122' Truck" at least.

 

[mikedrom]

Doing some additional reading on this I think it's worth mentioning that this may be confusing to APRS and Yaesu users due to the use of angle bracket.

Using an example APRS packet taken from aprs.fi raw feed for the digipeater being used here.

2023-11-22 08:35:36 MST: AC0XW-1>APDW16,TCPIP*,qAC,T2SJC:!3949.46N110503.55W#Westy Fill-in Digi and IGate, https://AC0XW.TechSavage.net

In a parsed APRS packet the source or destination station is left of the bracket. So in this case AC0XW was the source station. To the right of the bracket is the parsed information that packet had.

But what Yaesu is displaying seems to be an internal status and call sign of heard station.

If anyone's interested the packet was parsed as follows.

The APDW16 is software and version number. APDW16 means the station is using Direwolf (APDW) version 1.6 (16).

Releases · wb2osz/direwolf

Dire Wolf is a software "soundcard" AX.25 packet modem/TNC and APRS encoder/decoder. It can be used stand-alone to observe APRS traffic, as a tracker, digipeater, APRStt gateway, or Inter...

github.com

Next is TCPIP*, which is a third party indicator for a packet received over APRS-IS. When doing APRS over the air this field will be something else.

The next field has qAC, which is part of the q-algorithm for packet routing. This indicates the packet came from a verified source, which is the call sign indicated after it.

That is T2SJC, which is a server on the APRS-IS network, specifically a tier 2 server used on a rotating basis. SJC is run by a volunteer most likely.

aprs2.net Status Monitor

This is how all iGates are going to look on APRS. Stations heard or direct RF will be different.

After that colon is the GPS location for AC0XW, 3949.46N110503.55W

And the end is a free text status message.

So a regular station packet.

2023-11-22 13:40:29 MST: KE0VH-2>T1TQTR,WY7HR-1,WIDE1*,WIDE2-1,qAO,WB7GR-10:`oTpr5lk/`"Bu}447.400MHz T103 -500 SkyHubLink.com, TEXT 4 FREQ 303-704-329_%

In this case the source was KE0VH-2.

T1TQTR means the station is using MIC-E encoding. You can parse it but those 6 digits contain a lot of data.

T1TQTR is 0x54 0x31 0x54 0x51 0x54 0x52

MIC-E uses the least significant byte of digits to make a latitude, so 414142 means 41° 41.42'

The most significant byte is parsed bit-wise but the APRS spec for MIC-E tells you by character what it means.

So:
T in digit one means message is 1
1 in digit two means message 0
T in digit three means message is 1
Q in digit four tells you N/S is north
T in digit give is longtitude offset and is +100°
R in digit six tells you W/S and is west

So we know this station is status 101 and that's message two (M2) and "In-Service" N41° 41.42' and W by at least 100°

To know exact longitude you have to decode the information field, which is the 9 digits [`oTpr5lk/] between the brackets.

[`oTpr5lk/] is [0x60 0x6f 0x54 0x70 0x72 0x35 0x6c 0x6b 0x2f] or [096 111 084 112 114 053 108 107 047]

First digit is data type and the tick (') means current GPS data
Second digit (o) is decimal 111°
Third digit (T) is 84 minutes
Fourth digit p is 112 seconds
Fifth, sixth and seventh are speed and course, (r5l) and pretty convoluted but it's 34 knots or 39 MPH. I'd have to work harder at getting the rest.
Eighth and ninth digits are symbol, (k/) is truck

So from those two fields we know MIC-E encoded "In-Service N41° 41.42' and W111° 84.122' Truck" at least.

This is awesome info. Thank you!!