APRS and Echonet - what are they for?

APRS is a data service that can run on Amateur radio networks.

What its for:
It's for providing tracking data, as in sending your GPS position via radio when you're out of range of cell service. Like container ships at sea, or hikers in the wilderness, mountain climbing.

How it works:
Plug your GPS device into your Beofeng handheld radio via a data cable. Your position is transmitted to a website where you can be tracked. Generally one would use an Android phone which has GPS built in and there's an app to run APRS on it.

You can buy HT radios that have GPS built and support APRS, so you don't need to plug in your cell phone. However those radios generally cost $500+. And you already have the GPS receiver built into your phone. Just download the app, and turn off cell, wifi, Bluetooth on your phone to extend battery life.

Other nice features of APRS are it supports a simple messaging service like SMS. You don't need a radio to receive APRS data, it appears on a website. You may be able to get APRS data out even when you're out of range for voice radio reception.

Echonet is an Internet / Radio gateway.

What it's for:
Echonet allows you to talk on Ham repeaters via your cell phone or desktop. You install the app, select any Echonet enabled repeater and talk, just like you would with a radio.

Anyone that's on the same repeater can talk back and fourth with you, just like you're both on radios.
Echolink lets you select any repeater in the world to talk on. In some sense it allows you to use your phone as a Ham radio. And in the same sense, you have to be a licensed Ham operator to use Echolink.


Both APRS and Echonet are fun toys, it's a wow moment to see your radio show up on the APRS map and to talk into your cell phone with Echolink and have it come out on your Ham radio. However there's a lot of hoops to jump through to get up and running on these services and I doubt I'll have any continuing use for either of them. What I really need is a data service via a phone app that I can connect to my radio with usb or Bluetooth and upload my current position and download any SMS/emails. Notice I didn't say what I need is to spend a couple hundred dollars on a DMR radio. A simple messaging / data service is all we need for existing Ham radios.

Odds and sods : SDR - Software Defined Radio - Linux USB stick set...

Odds and sods : SDR - Software Defined Radio - Linux USB stick set...: Getting started with SDR is cheap and simple. You buy the USB stick on Amazon , install a few RPMs, connect up to a antenna and you're ...

CHIRP under Fedora Linux for Baofeng

First off, it doesn't work.

The problem is mainly around the wonderful world of Python. The Chirp kiddies are stuck on the very old Python 2.7 version while the world has moved onto Python 3.8. A fact that's only vaguely hinted at on the Chirp website. And since we're talking about Python, you'll find yourself in missing module hell very quick. To sort this all out requires a first class science officer rating from Star Fleet.

Now, to actually be able to use Chirp, download the latest version from chirp.danplanet.com.
This version, depending on when you are reading this, may or may not have been updated to Python 3, I can tell you as of June 2020, it still only runs on Python 2.7. To get it to work on Fedora 30+ google and install excatly these RPMs:

python-libxml2-2.9.10-1.fc30.x86_64.rpm
python2-pyserial-3.4-3.fc31.noarch.rpm

After you untar Chirp, cd to the dir and:

python2.7 chirpw &

Next, plug in your cable to the radio and computer and:

chmod a+rw /dev/ttyUSB0

In the app tool bar, Radio -> Download from Radio. Likely you'll have to scroll way down and select ttyUSB0.

The above works with chirp-daily-20200603 and Fedora 32.