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APRS Notification Service?

DwightFrye

Active Member
There are services out there which will send alerts if an airplane you are interested in tracking files a flight plan or departs on a flight. I believe this is only available if you are filing IFR, and require the plane to be "in the system". It is a cool sort of service, and I wondered about how difficult it would be to craft something similar for folks running APRS trackers.

Not wanting to replicate work someone else had done I did a bit if a search to see if something like this existed already. The only thing I found was a post from a few years ago here proposing something almost identical to what I was considering You can go read it here :

http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=27780

I tried emailing Eric, and have gotten no response, and saw no other posts on the subject. I conclude that it has not been done yet (and am very willing to hear that I'm mistaken, and the service already exists), but that from the small number of responses it may be a service that would see little adoption.

At a minimum I'm going to build something for myself. I already have the ability to connect to the APRS-IS service and get a filtered data feed (so I'm not having to inhale APRS traffic from all over the world for every type of data packet). I can parse the packets, so can identify the transmitting station ID. From that it is easy to keep track of when I heard from that station last and infer (and it is just an inference) that the station has begun a new flight.

Would anyone else find this sort of service interesting? Doing it for myself is trivial, and requires little in the way of effort at this point. Doing it for a broader community would entail a bit more work ... and I'd like to know it was going to deliver enough value to enough people before I embarked.

So, if you'd find this interesting speak up. If you have thoughts on "features" feel free to venture opinions. I have no idea what the threshold of "expressed interest" might push me over the edge ... but we can have a conversation about it (or not, if nobody feels they would use something like this). Thanks!

-- Dwight
 
I'm in!

I have no expertise regarding the technical hurdles but I am a APRS user and would welcome such a notification service.
 

This looks interesting, and does the basic task of generating alerts. It is more generic than what I was envisioning, but it gets the job done. I had thought about a few extra aircraft-specific embellishments such as identifying the airport from which it appears the plane departed, I had also thought in terms of the APRS owner controlling notifications rather than having arbitrary anonymous people just registering interest and getting notifications.

BUT, if those embellishments don't deliver meaningful additional value then the existing service does the trick. And, at the moment, that is what I'm assuming. If folks have different opinions, like the additional embellishments, or even have any additional ideas I'm all ears.
 
I set up a couple test alerts at aprs-alert.net and they work great for triggering messages for individual trackers.
 
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