APRS viewer using Google Maps
Description
Please note that this project is now obsolete. A very good APRS viewer can be found at http://aprs.fi.
On Christmas 2007 while reviving my ham radio station I noticed that there is still lots of traffic in the 144.800Mhz. That traffic is mostly made of unproto ax.25 frames, most of them with GPS data.
After a quick search on google I learned about APRS and its uses.
So I started looking for a viewer application for Linux or Mac. What I found was disapointing compared to the alternatives available for windows, AGWTracker and UI-View32. Since AGWTracker uses Google Maps internally I decided to give the Google Maps API a try and from what I can tell it's very simple to use!
I developed a daemon application that listens on my TNC2-CT serial port for monitor frames with GPS data in AX.25 mode (no kiss mode yet) and stores them in memory. From time to time it writes a new html page with the updated frame info represented by markers.
Give it a try > click here to load my viewer <
Screenshots
Daemon running in foreground:
View from the web browser:
This version is very simple and does not take full advantage of the Google Maps API.
Problems to be solved:
The web page reloads after a minute, reseting the zoom level to its default.
The data is hardcoded into the page. Next version will have a static html page and parse data from a small XML file, updating the map in runtime without reseting it!
Acknowledge
Portions of this code were based on work from findu.com a simple viewer using Google Maps. Click here to check if I'm On The Air or go to Google Maps APRS.