Image from W3PGA.
Amateur radio operators were among the first to design, build and maintain a digital RF tracking system. APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System), is a digital communications protocol for exchanging information among a large number of stations covering a large (local) area. Bob Bruninga, WB4APR, a senior research engineer at the United States Naval Academy, implemented the earliest ancestor of APRS on an Apple II computer the early 1980s. The first use of APRS was in 1984, when Bruninga developed a more advanced version on a Commodore VIC-20 for reporting the position and status of horses in a 100-mile (160 km) endurance run. Today there are thousands of amateur radio APRS stations around the world tracking all types of vehicles and reporting weather from backyards to mountain peaks.
SBARC was an early supporter of APRS, maintaining an i-gate and digipeaters for the network at our repeater sites.
Visit aprs.fi for a worldwide map of APRS stations.
This page contains information from Wikipedia.
