APRS 101 Part 1 - The Most Underutilized Amateur Radio Mode

APRS is a digital over analog connectionless network of users, digital repeaters and internet gateways. Most amateurs use it for reporting their position in near-real-time. Some use it for weather station data or other telemetry.
I've setup a digipeater/i-gate and have begun writing some companion software for the Direwolf TNC called Shadowcat, and in doing so, have learned quite a bit about how the network functions.
Given that pretty much any information can be sent over this network, it seems to me that there is a lot of untapped potential. For example, it could be used to transmit state information between stations or servers or it could be leveraged to interface with various open APIs and provide useful bulletins to a region or specific users, and a couple of examples.
In this video, I cover the basics of the APRS network, and in subsequent videos, I will cover my digipeater/i-gate and the Shadowcat software I am writing to hopefully extend the functionality of the network. This video is a sort of APRS for beginners.

[@KenPryor]

Very helpful. I've wondered about APRS for a while and just recently started looking into it more. I think it would be fun to setup my own digipeater/igate.

[@labreja1]

Hi Steven. Thanks for the informative APRS video. Well done. I look forward to more of your videos. 73. K8JCL

[@kd8mkg]

Cheers! Thanks for watching. ☺

[@ivrsn_1569]

So it’s basically messaging thru RF insteadof voice?

[@kd8mkg]

It's more than that, but that is one of the things it is, yes. Other things it is used for are position reports, weather reports from weather stations, status reports (status of, for example, a repeater), beacons; but fundamentally, it is text being transmitted over RF, with an internet-based infrastructure behind it.