New user comments

1

I run the web site where the ham radio APRS data is downloaded. I just got my receiver yesterday and online quickly, it was a surprisingly easy setup process. My first comment on the user interface is the signal indicator ought to link you directly to the receiver information page giving the details of what the bars mean. I’m sure I’ll have more :wink:

Overnight the first Wikipedia page came through, for a South Korean girl band called BlackPink. When I think of all the amazing pages on Wikipedia I have to say “huh?” at that choice.

The weather page is amazing to look at, but it isn’t very helpful to actually predict the weather at any given location. I wonder if there isn’t a better interface to the gridded data that would give a real forecast.

This is a very interesting idea, good job!

Steve K4HG

3 Likes
2

I am really interested in leveraging APRS via HF and VHF-Sat as a back link for messages and Outernet as a down-link of APRS messages.

I look forward to your involvement in Outernet.

1 Like
3

That should be working now. Add OUTNET to any message on APRS, and (assuming it makes it to the APRS Internet System) it should appear on the messages feed. For now everything from and via the ISS is also in the feed. The ISS packet system went down a few weeks ago, came back online yesterday. So far though there have been no digipeated packets from it, it may be just that people got out of the habit of using it, or there may still be a problem.

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4

Hi Steve! Glad you got the setup working.

The Wikipedia selection is sort-of random from the recently top viewed pages as reported by wikipedia itself. Evidently a lot of people care about the band :smiley:

The UI is being completely redone, so you input on that I will be sure to consider in the new UI.

5

At the moment Outernet are automatically grabbing pages from the 5000 most popular

@syed I’d suggest it would be more topical to just get the top page from here every day (Excluding some porn, 404 pages & a few TV station pages that don’t seem that interesting) What do you think?

It should be as easy as wget on the top link from that page, then once a file has been broadcast you could stick it in a blacklist to not be re-broadcast for X months…

(Just picking some random dates; You’d have got David Bowie’s page the day after his death Brexit a couple of days after it happened Pokemon Go a couple of days after release Michael Phelps at the Olympics The Eurovision song contest result)

In short I think it would be a good way to get some in-depth info on stuff that’s happening, along with a mix of random stuff, like the Anterior interventricular branch of left coronary artery & The Black Robin & The Clathrate gun hypothesis

–Edit–

Just noticed you can do the same for other languages like French, Spanish Arabic Chinese, Turkish, Russian so this would be a really nice way to diversify content, and provide topical information to people where Wikipedia and other news sources are blocked.

Say it’s 500kb for a compressed Wikipedia page (220 after compresstion) on average you’d be looking at 1.5mb a day to do 7 languages. I think it would do a lot for the perception of the project to do so though.

6

I have not noticed any new APRS downloads for a while.

A few weeks ago we got the APRS messages every hour. But now I am not sure.

I also had the YACC software running but now I am not sure if it is connecting to the data on my CHIP and displaying it on the YACC map.

On looking through the RAW Outernet delivered APRS messages it was definitely displaying the ISS satellite APRS messages.

Seasalt

7

I’m getting the messages file every hour. It seems like the system even interrupts a big file to send the messages file shortly after the top of the hour. Does your APRS client connect to the APRS Internet System? If you send a message that contains “OUTNET” - not OUTERNET because the system is set up for the 6 character ham callsign limit - it should appear. Just don’t send the message to me, for a reason I still haven’t been able to track down the system eats messages to and from me! My callsign is all throughout the system and somehow I messed something up I haven’t figured out!

8

Thanks for the reply Steve. I have checked My CHIP Library APRS file and I have FTP’d into the directory and I have no APRS messages for November.

APRS Messages no November..png1366×768 228 KB

9

i’m not used to being the noob, usually I’m the one with the answers. I can say something is wrong on your en. I’ve only had my receiver for 48 hours, and in that time I have regularly received the messages-0.html and messages-1.html (alternating every hour) shortly after the top of the hour. I presume other files are coming through fine. I use rxos on a Pi so my interface is different, but if I read your pic right you are in the correct directory. Do you have a recents function? the messages files are always near the top of that in my system. Are there any options to ignore duplicate file names in your interface, or anything else that could result in ignoring incoming data? Other than that you need someone with more knowledge of Outernet than I!

10

A few weeks ago I was receiving the APRS messages every hour and I managed to get YACC displaying the data.

Now I am not receiving APRS messages. I suspect one culprit could be I am on a different Inmarsat Satellite to you . I am in Philippines on 3f1 you, I assume are On the Americas Inmarsat satellite. Possibly the Carousel is not putting APRs messages on my satellite.

Are you running the CHIP or Raspberry Pi? I am running the CHIP based version of Outernet.

11

The three satellites are sending the exact same APRS set.

12

Should I delete the old APRS messages?

I have not been watching the downloads that much but I do not recall seeing any APRS messages for the last week.

Are you absolutely sure the 3 satellites are sending the same APRS data?

Are there any other users who can confirm Inmarsat 3F1 is sending APRS data?

13

Yeah :smiley:

14

Ok then where have the APRS files gone?

What am I or the CHIP computer doing wrong?

15

Look thru your logs and look for the files received. grep for “messages-”. Post that. That should tell us when you last received the files.

16

I am using Ubuntu Firefox.

When I go to Application Logs it just tries to open and spins and nothing happens.

Outernetlogs just spinning.png1366×768 46.1 KB

17

the logs might be too large.

if you are comfortable with putty/ssh, you might try with those. the logfile we want is /mnt/data/log/fsal.log

else - it might be worth checking if your storage is full. And if it is, try emptying things out.

Same as @kenbarbi, you seem to have a LOT of file on the receiver. Unfortunately Librarian doesn’t handle that situation well.

18

I have never removed any files since I set it up months ago.

The CHIP has recently been running slower and slower.

I just thought the upgrade to 3.2 would fix it.

What files should I delete?

19

they are just files - leave the Weather folder alone, rest is really upto you.

Inside the Weather/data/weather folder - it makes a lot of sense to delete all of the folders older than yesterday. just don’t delete the Weather/data/weather/current folder. and the other files.

Ideally just delete everything you don’t want to keep (with the above caveat about the Weather folder).

20

I deleted the old weather data for October (10) .

Is that enough to get the CHIP to return back to Normal operation?