APRS Tsunami (Warning) Symbol and possible alert mechanism over aprs.fi ?

[Hüseyin ODABAŞ, TA1DF]

Hello group,

I have newly been informed about the "basic tsunami warning product/template for use by the radio amateurs" requested by IOC Assembly (June 2025) to be disseminated as a guidence. Basically it is a product to be issued by the national tsunami warning centers / tsunami service providers in format "At HH:MM local time a magnitude X.X earthquake occurred at Lat,Lon with a depth of X km, X km Direction of Place. The NTWC has issued a tsunami alert level for Place."

Now my questions are :

1- Do we have an APRS symbol for "Tsunami Warning" ?  Note : According to UNESCO ITIC relevant page  , there are three ISO approved (2008) International Tsunami Signs.

2- Do we have any kind of basic tsunami or earthquake alerting mechanism that can be triggered while visiting aprs.fi web site ?

Thanks in advance for answers , 

Be safe and best 73 !

Huseyin, TA1DF

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Mon, 8 Sep 2025, Hüseyin ODABAŞ, TA1DF wrote:

> 1- Do we have an APRS symbol for "Tsunami Warning" ?  Note : According
> to UNESCO ITIC relevant page  , there are three ISO approved (2008)
> International Tsunami Signs.

No.

The original list (https://www.aprs.org/symbols.html) doesn't have one,
here's the index used by aprs.fi and maybe a few other apps, based on
Bob's original document:

https://github.com/hessu/aprs-symbol-index/blob/master/symbols.csv

The additional symbols set which is based on overlay characters on the
second (alt) table doesn't have one either, and it is not widely adopted:

https://www.aprs.org/symbols/symbols-new.txt

Note that adding new APRS symbols does not really happen in practice, as
they are built in to each APRS device and software. Some use shared symbol
graphics sets but many don't. There are a lot of devices which won't get
firmware updates (and even if they do, they might not get upgraded), and
there's desktop software in popular use which are not maintained (authors
are deceased, or otherwise lost interest).

I believe symbols defined in symbols-new.txt have not been adopted in a
lot of new software because it's a lot of work for authors to collect and
assemble the symbols. It's easy to allocate them but finding or drawing
graphics which work on large high-resolution screens and tiny
low-resolution screens takes time.

I collected (gathered, drew, assembled) one symbol graphics set (in vector
source format!) which is used by aprs.fi and is available for others to
use. It took an awful lot of time and still does not have the symbols from
symbols-new.txt. Some other software uses it, but some new apps and web
sites don't - perhaps they prefer to have a different visual look than
aprs.fi, or they acknowledge the shortcomings of my artistic skills and
figure they can do better.

https://github.com/hessu/aprs-symbols

> 2- Do we have any kind of basic tsunami or earthquake alerting mechanism
> that can be triggered while visiting aprs.fi web site ?

The aprs.fi site does not have such alerting mechanisms, it's just a web
site. But probably you'd want to address the APRS system as a larger
ecosystem, not just one web site alone, and the correct places to discuss
that would be the groups.io APRS group, and the APRSSIG.

https://groups.io/g/APRS
https://lists.tapr.org/mailman/listinfo/aprssig_lists.tapr.org

- Hessu

[Hüseyin ODABAŞ, TA1DF]

Thank you Hessu !

Answers were quite helpful. I will try the groups you have mentioned.

By the way thank you again for the excellent APRS symbols in vector graphics. I am using that set of symbols with pleasure on my embedded experimenral APRS display.

Best 73 and be safe

Hüseyin ODABAŞ, TA1DF

9 Eyl 2025 Sal 09:55 tarihinde Heikki Hannikainen <he...@hes.iki.fi> şunu yazdı:

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