Aprs In 1990S; Aprs-Is Res The Information Worldwide - Kenwood TH-D74A/E Operating Tips

2 ENJOYING APRS (by BOB BRUNINGA, WB4APR)

2.4 APRS in 1990s

I formally presented APRS at the TAPR/ARRL Digital Conference in 1992. APRS really
took off as the cost of GPS got below $500 each and I manually digitized maps of the entire
U.S.A. and some other countries using coordinates measured from paper maps. It was
during these times that the "P" in APRS was temporarily called "Position" to highlight this
new capability. Unfortunately, this was a mistake.
Over the next decade as GPS became readily available, too many hams only saw the
position maps of APRS and not the broad communication applications for human-to-human
tactical ham radio information exchange in real time.
Too many operators bought transmit-only GPS trackers and further ignored the real-time
human communications element. Many follow-on software clients focused on maps with
little attention to the underlying network protocol and live human-to-human connectivity both
local and global.
The APRS network is primarily designed for local real-time operations,
but the APRS-IS collects information from local IGates and shares the information worldwide.

2.5 APRS-IS res the information worldwide

In 1997, K4HG Steve Dimse and the Mac/WinAPRS Sproul brothers tied APRS to the
Internet and the APRS-IS system as shown above was born. Over the years the network
has grown including several Amateur Satellites since 2001 and in 2015 even an APRS
channel with global downlink coverage via the Inmarsats called Outernet.
See http://aprs.org/outnet.html
While this was a huge success that enabled instantaneous global APRS texting connectivity
worldwide, it also further enhanced the map view experience of casual APRS viewers.
Looking at an APRS map was colorful but it still did not obviously convey the real-time
human contact and connectivity inherent in the system. Also, it was impossible to
communicate with all of the one-way trackers equipment which had no receivers.
The value of two-way amateur radio communications was further being lost in favor of
simple one-dimensional icons on maps. These simple icons omitted the other 8
dimensions of color attributes associated with each APRS symbol that gave additional
at-a-glance real time information to viewers such as type, age, moving-or-static,
object-or-station, ownership, and liver-operator or messaging capability.
See http://aprs.org/symbols.html
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