Building a Simple APRS Digipeater/IGate with the Bare Minimum

 Hi everyone!

With my recent adventures into the world of APRS, I figured that I should create a digipeater/iGate combo for the Maryville area. We have at least a dozen hams in town and I know of one in particular that uses APRS. Receiving packets in Maryville is easy - there is a station close to 30 miles away in Iowa that digipeats several packets down to our town without error. There is also a station in St. Joseph that I can hear perfectly too, as well as Falls City, NE - a little over 40 miles away from Maryville.

APRS: The OG IoT

As a computer scientist, I was required to take a networking fundamentals course. This course showed us how the modern day internet works and how each OSI layer interacts with one another. We sniffed network packets and learned how to wire ethernet cables. This semester, I'm taking an Internet of Things (IoT) course, which definitely goes hand-in-hand with my networking class.

Of course, my amateur radio adventures had to include some form of computer science/networking crossover. And that is where the topic of APRS comes in.