APRS2SOTA is a gateway between the APRS system and SotaWatch

The gateway accepts formatted messages from the APRS network and posts Spots on the SotaWatch site

The APRS2SOTA gateway accepts messages in 2 forms:

The first form is as shown in the APRS Protocol Specification (V1.0.1 Chap 14) as 'MESSAGES BULLETINS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS'. An example when received from the Internet APRS Servers looks like:

G0LGS-2>APRS,TCPIP*,qAS,G0LGS::SOTA     :ON/ON-010$ Test Ignore{003

(i.e. a message directed to 'SOTA').

The second form is a simple AX25 'Beacon Text' (if you can get it thru a I-Gate), which might look like:

M3WDS-2>APRS,TCPIP*,qAS,M3WDS:G/WB-019,M3WDS,144320khz,Test (APRS) - Ignore,SSB

Information Required

Each APRS message requires:

• Operating Frequency (with or without units, given in KHz or MHz)
• Mode (AM,CW,DATA,DV,FM,PSK,RTTY,SSB,OTHER)
• Full Summit Reference (from the SOTA Database)

Optional Information

Each APRS message may also contain:

• The operators callsign (with or without any prefix or suffix)
• A short Comment

Formatting of Paramaters

Parameters may appear in any order, any text that is NOT recognised as a valid Callsign, Mode, Frequency or Summit Ref will be treated as part of a comment.

Parameters may be separated by any of the following:

'   "   `   ^   #   @   !   %   ,   :   ;   or a space

Prefix, Callsign and Association matching

The APRS2SOTA system accepts UK calls with any regional variation (G,GW,GM; M,MU,MW; 2E,2W,2M etc) and handles putting in the correct regional callsign variation to match the given Summit reference.

It will add /P (unless another suffix such as /M is given with the callsign in the APRS info).

For non-UK operators in the UK and any operators in another Country it will try to add the Country Prefix (i.e. ON/G0LGS/P or MW/F6ENO/P etc) when necessary (unless another one is given with the APRS info).

Note: The code for callsign/summit matching is complex and may not yet work exactly as expected, this means spots may appear on SotaWatch with different pre-fixes to those actually being used by an activatior (work on this part of the gateway code is ongoing).

Spot duplication.

The gateway should not re-post an identical spot if received within 10 minutes of the previous spot.

APRS Ack's and Gateway Messages

As of 20/12/2011 the gateway will attempt to send APRS Acks and attempt to respond via APRS with information informing the APRS user of sucessful/failed/duplcate spots.

Access to the APRS2SOTA Gateway

If anyone would like to use the APRS2SOTA gateway then contact me so that I can add you to the list of authorised users.

Note: I have been requested by the SOTA Management Team to prevent spots using certain callsigns being posted on SOTAwatch, so in accordance with their wishes the system has a list of callsigns that will NOT be permitted to post spots (or have spots posted for them).