Hm, aprs.fi got a bit overloaded due to a crawler from Alibaba Cloud LLC getting aggressive at 07:47 (blocked it at 08:07). One of those crawlers which don't identify as a crawler but rather uses random regular browser user-agent strings. Blocked all traffic from Alibaba for now. It had started already yesterday and ramped up the query rate in smaller steps, until it suddenly bumped up to hundreds of requests per second.

I wonder if other APRS web sites get this sort of thing a lot, mine does?

aprs.fi was down between 2024-11-21 02:42:05 and 08:00 UTC today, due to an UPS failure at the hosting location. I hear the UPS was not really happy with itself at all, some sort of existential crisis. Some disk storage corruption happened as well, I'll have to do some follow-up work. APRS messaging real-time notifications to aprs.fi app got properly fixed at 09:22 UTC.

v2.6.1 of the iOS app is out!
• It’s now possible to change the account callsign/nickname from within the app (More -> My account).
• A few improvements in the station profile rename feature, to improve the chances of having an AX.25 compliant callsign-SSID by default.

v2.6.0 is out! New button to switch symbol size (helps with age vision & when using the app in a car), brand new symbol for RVs, and more 3x high-resolution graphics to make things look really sharp on the latest devices.

The new symbol is available in the free High-resolution APRS symbol set, which now also ships with a big bunch of new PNG resolutions:

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

For a long time I've been a little bit bothered that the APRS symbol set has a symbol defined for RVs (Recreational Vehicles), but the symbol graphic just says "RV". With a little help from Adobe's AI (and some hand tuning on top) I've now created a new symbol for RVs. Unlike the old "RV" letters, it can also meaningfully point to directions. I'm not entirely sure this was the best way to spend 1 evening, but I finally scratched that itch.

But there's a bug in it: station symbol graphics are placed in random-looking incorrect positions. So, better wait for 2.5.5 which will hopefully be out tomorrow.

There's a new aprs.fi iOS app version 2.5.4 out! Bug fixes in Messaging, DSP TNC, Localisation updates, implementation of Mic-E device identification, and 1-year subscriptions now support Family Sharing. https://groups.google.com/g/aprsfi/c/hVUS9FbqDSc

@IU1KGS @jeffpc @tsherrygeo Like, if object X is posted at 08:00, and someone looks at the map at 10:00 and has selected a 6-hour time range, the object would be shown, unless a deletion has been sent. This would be in line with Bob's "shared whiteboard" "tactical" idea.

But if the object is searched by name specifically, I think aprs.fi should find and show it, because it certainly did exist before, and the idea and point of the service is to keep a historical archive of APRS data.

@IU1KGS @jeffpc @tsherrygeo Right, some of the assumptions in the old specs are not valid for archives and databases like aprs.fi. They also assume good will from everyone and no abuse of services (think deletion of other peoples data without asking).

aprs.fi currently does not support the object deletion feature. If it did, I think it should only hide the object from the regular area/map view within the user-selected time period, instead of completely deleting the historical data.

I also fixed the XML document declaration & UTF-8 encoding issues on the XML variant of the APRS device id database. There is an actual non-ascii character appearing in there in a developer's name!

@xssfox I only run aprx for igates here. It's quite reliable indeed, and thin.

The APRS device ID database has new download URLs kindly hosted on a CloudFlare distribution by the APRS Foundation! The XML & JSON versions are now published there, and the copies in the generated/ directory are no longer maintained. https://github.com/aprsorg/aprs-deviceid/pull/152/files?short_path=b335630#diff-b335630551682c19a781afebcf4d07bf978fb1f8ac04c6bf87428ed5106870f5

@bud_t Thanks. There's discussion on this here, the LoRa APRS folks are welcome to join: https://groups.io/g/APRS/topic/lora_aprs_igates_and/106326352

aprs.fi generally tries to drop packets which have been corrupted by iGates. For consistency, packets with added RSSI/SNR values are now also dropped at aprs.fi. There are cases where a single packet arrives at aprs.fi as 3 different copies due to them being modified by iGates with varying RSSI fields.

It'd be great if the #LoRaAPRS would not modify packets to add an RSSI field in the comment text.

APRS packet data must be retransmitted unmodified, because modified packets will be duplicates. https://github.com/hessu/aprsc/blob/main/doc/IGATE-HINTS.md

@HopelessDemigod Hi, unfortunately there is no other information about the source than the callsign, and the software being used (jAPRSIgate). It seems like there is a D-Star DPRS gateway running with that callsign-SSID.

@tony You can change the color scheme as you please if you render yourself. The public tile service doesn't seem to have any options. I don't blame them, it would multiply their rendering load.

But my poor little 128 GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core Processor, 2*4 TB NVMe SSD tile server wasn't fast enough for the full data set, had to filter out quite a lot of the little details to make it work.

Trying to run aprs.fi with the OSM public tile service now. It seems to meet the requirements on the current policy; if it hits them too hard, it's easy to switch back.

Much quicker rendering from their large servers & mostly cached on their Fastly CDN frontend, and much more details. I couldn't load all the details in my database, it was way too slow to render from there.