Running a APRS RX-iGate as non HAM

[Peter Stirnimann]

Dear all

As part of a training campaign, we are planning a workshop on building a
"LoRa APRS RX-only Gateway" (433 MHz-ISM Band) , feeding the received data to APRS-FI. 

Thereby we would like to motivate students to deal with IoT projects and 

to deal with amateur radio.

Now to my question: How can a student, without callsign operate an
APRS-iGate (RX only)? Is there an alias call like in the CWOP program?

Thank you in advance

Peter, hb9pae

[Heikki Hannikainen]

On Wed, 23 Nov 2022, Peter Stirnimann wrote:

> Now to my question: How can a student, without callsign operate an
> APRS-iGate (RX only)? Is there an alias call like in the CWOP program?

The APRS-IS is meant and designed for use by amateur radio operators only.
There are some non-hams in there already (truckers running APRSdroid,
etc), but it's a bit of a pain point and complaints about it come in every
now and then.

The igates send some packets to the APRS-IS as well, and packets from the
APRS-IS may at times be retransmitted back to RF on amateur frequencies,
and retransmission of non-ham traffic to amateur frequencies is a problem,
as in most countries it's not allowed by the local regulations.

The students would not be breaking any laws, but having such operations
(non-ham traffic coming in to the APRS-IS) would at times cause hams
operating transmit-capable igates to break their license conditions.

I'd assume, since it's ISM use, some of the trackers transmitting to the
iGate and on to the APRS-IS would be used by non-hams as well.

I suppose the non-ham APRS-like operators should go to a different
network of servers.

- Hessu

[thebut...@cox.net]

Wonder if instead of to APRS-IS, the gateway could feed to a TAK server https://github.com/pinztrek/aprstak