|
|
NewsAPRS™ database and information |
|||||||
| Home | Find Station | About | News | |||||
| Searching by multiple stations | Posted by: KB0THN - 15-Jan-2005 |
|---|---|
| You can now search for multiple stations at once by simply separating callsigns by the | character. Searching for weather stations "KB0VYO-12|KB0THN-2|K0NY-2" will show you the weather stations I'm interested in. Try the link below | |
| http://db.aprsworld.net/datamart/switch.php?call=kb0vyo-12%7Ckb0thn-2%7Ck0ny-2&table=weather&maps=yes&search=Search | |
| Introducting map.aprsworld.net and wx.aprsworld.net | Posted by: KB0THN - 28-Oct-2004 |
You can now access station details by going to:
| |
| APRS Events Page | Posted by: KB0THN - 10-Sep-2004 |
| Please take a look and add events. | |
| http://aprsworld.net/events/ | |
| Track search page simplified | Posted by: KB0THN - 02-Sep-2004 |
| I changed the track search page to make it somewhat simplier to use.
Dave Norris, KG9AE, has been hard at work on the parser. I'm back to having no time again, but at least I have a high speed internet connection at home again. | |
| http://db.aprsworld.net/datamart/track-search.php | |
| ARRLWeb mentions aprsworld | Posted by: KB0THN - 14-Jul-2004 |
| http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2004/07/09/1/ | |
| station icons on search by area | Posted by: KB0THN - 13-Jul-2004 |
| I'm slowing introducing the APRS icon / symbols into the new mapping system. You will now note that on the search by location page the stations now show symbols. | |
| more work | Posted by: KB0THN - 12-Jul-2004 |
| I upgraded my map software on maps.aprsworld.net so it is the same as on geo.aprsworld.net. As a result the two machines can now load balance or if one fails the other can take over for it. I did do some testing by putting maps in DNS round robin with geo and everything seemed to work fine. I'm not leaving it in that configuration because I'd like to have maps be fast for aprsworld uses and not bogged down with all of the findu hits to geo.
I also spent a while today attempting to the aprsworld Sourceforge Project CVS up-to-date with what is actually running. I think the web module should be in sync now, but the parser is not. | |
| New search pages, new track page, new RAID array | Posted by: KB0THN - 23-Jun-2004 |
| Okay, big updates:
The main "find station" page has been updated. You can find links to location based searching, and track searches. The track page has been totally re-done. It now uses the new geo.aprsworld.net mapserver and is a totally different system architecture. It will automatically eliminate points from a track that it thinks are bad - this help when there is a single bad point that screws up an entire plot. It's really cool. I'll write more about it at some point, but for now I just encourage you to try tracking. You can see a a track of where I went this weekend as an example. The odometer is pretty cool. I actually drove 702 miles and it claims ~630. It is really accurate for aeronautical things.
The new RAID array is online and the main database is running off of it. It's two 160 gigabyte 7200 RPM IDE drives. I physically installed them last week, but it wasn't until today I got both up and in RAID-1 configuration. | |
| scheduled downtime on db.aprsworld.net 16-June-2004 | Posted by: KB0THN - 15-Jun-2004 |
| db.aprsworld.net will be down Wednesday morning for up to an hour while I install a the 160 gig drives and new controller. | |
| New track and near pages on the way | Posted by: KB0THN - 14-Jun-2004 |
| Beta testing of a new track page is under way. The new track page will automatically filter bad packets, show a odometer, and some other cool features. The new "near" page will make it possible to find stations near another APRS station, near a zip code, or near a city and state. The zip code and city / state is currently limited to the US ... but hopefully that will change in the future. If you have postal code data for your country please let me know. | |
| May update | Posted by: KB0THN - 30-May-2004 |
| New IDE Drives: I tried installing the 160 gig drives in db.aprsworld.net at the end of April. The machine would only recoginize them as 32 gigabyte each, so it appears that BIOS is too old. Today I received a Silicon Image 680 Ultra 133 IDE controller and installed it in my personal workstation. It recoginized the drives and everything seems happy. Next time I am down in Ames I will install the drives in db.aprsworld.net.
SCSI Raid Array: Also at the end of April I spent some time diagnosing the 73 gig Ultra 160 SCSI array. It turns out that one of the Maxtor drives has failed which caused the array to go into a recovery mode which slowed it down. Despite the fact that I purchased the drives from the cheapest source online (which is now apparently out of business) Maxtor has them under warranty. I just need to get the failed drive connected to a Windows box and run their diagnostic software. Unfortunately the only windows computer I have is my dual boot laptop, so I'll need to do some digging to find something to run it on. But once I get a new drive from Maxtor that array (2x73 gig 10k RPM Ultra 160 SCSI RAID-1) should be ready to go. I don't know what machine I will put it on. geo.aprsworld.net: This is the old findu machine that Steve Dimse gave me. It has been online since April and all it needs is the software to be setup and new street level map data to be installed. This is just a matter of me comming up with a few days to get everything configured and tested. me: It is summer for me so I finally have some time to work on aprsworld. I'm really looking forward to working on some of the outstanding issues and neat ideas that have come up since last summer. Keep your eyes out for neat stuff over the next few months. Due to the generous donations hardware hopefully won't be an issue over the summer and I can concentrate all of my efforts to software. I'm potentially looking for a couple of people that want to learn about the aprsworld system and possibly help monitor some of the systems. | |
| New drives for db ordered | Posted by: KB0THN - 31-Mar-2004 |
| I just ordered two 160 gigabyte Samsung 7200 RPM IDE drives for db.aprsworld.net. I'll (hopefully) be running them in RAID-1 configuration using the on-board hard drive controller on the motherboard. The purchase of these drives is a direct result of generous donations from aprsworld users - keep up the great work! | |
| dealing with mapping | Posted by: KB0THN - 11-Mar-2004 |
| maps.aprsworld.net is running pretty much full load these days. The load average is almost always above 1 and during peak times the load is around 4.
I shutdown javAPRSsrvr on maps.aprsworld.net to reduce some of the load on that machine. I also blew away all of the cached maps (7.2 gigs of maps generated in the last two days) and moved the cache to a bigger partition so it wouldn't fill up as quickly. So right now db.aprsworld.net is getting its feed from fourth.aprs.net. I'll get j2sdk installed on db.aprsworld.net and get javAPRSsrvr running on it. | |
| maps.aprsworld.net feeding findu | Posted by: KB0THN - 06-Feb-2004 |
| maps is taking on all of the mapping for findu's main find page. So far the cache system seems to be keeping things under control.
We'll see how it goes. There's some room for code optomization and there is plenty of room for faster hardware. | |
| hardware upgrade complete | Posted by: KB0THN - 06-Feb-2004 |
| Yesterday afternoon I installed the NetGear GA302T gigabit network cards in maps and db. Unfortunately the upsteam switch isn't gigabit, but that may soon be changed. | |
| Network upgrades on db and maps | Posted by: KB0THN - 04-Feb-2004 |
| Wednesday or Thursday afternoon both maps and db will be down for a hardware upgrade. I will be installing Netgear GA302T 1000 megabit (gig-e, baby!) NICs. Both machines are on a very fast gigabit switch to the Iowa State University network and this upgrade will allow increase NFS performance between machines and possibly increase performance for Internet2 users. Downtime is expected to be less than 30 minutes. | |
| 25 January 2004 Updates | Posted by: KB0THN - 25-Jan-2004 |
| I spent a few hours today working on aprsworld.net stuff.
Wind chill is now implemented on the weather station display page. I have it so if the temperature is greater than 40(F) or the speed in < 5(MPH) it will not calculate wind chill. I put a super simple web interface on the archive.aprsworld.net system. By going to this URL you will get back a text file with hourly weather data from a weather station. It's fast, approximately less than 20 seconds. http://archive.aprsworld.net/weather/getStation.php?call=kb0vyo-12 Or you can go to this URL and get dumps of your car or anything else with position. It is slower because it has much much more data to go through. http://archive.aprsworld.net/position/getStation.php?call=k0ny-7 Large lakes have been added to the regional map display on maps.aprsworld.net. The Great Lakes, The Great Salt Lake, Lake Tahoe, ect are in this. Makes the maps look a little better. I brought in a new symbol set from Xastir (thanks Xastir developers). It should be entirely correct. Please check your stations and see if there are any problems. This is my system wide icon / symbol data, so both maps and datamart stuff is updated. Discovered that the parser was not handling compressed packets correctly. That is now mostly fixed, in that compressed position packets should work fine. I did notice that there are some weather stations with compressed position data. I didn't know that was possible, but it appears to be and it appears that UIVIEW32 does that. So I'll need to get that working. | |
| Symbol / Icon Work | Posted by: KB0THN - 25-Jan-2004 |
| I updated the symbols used to the latest from Xastir. Hopefully this is a good symbol set. Right now there are some problems with colors in the mapserver maps (black doesn't always come through right) and Internet Explorer doesn't really like PNG images. But I don't care to fix Microsoft's bugs, so the Internet Explorer users can change to Mozilla or live with it, I guess. | |
| archive.aprsworld.net | Posted by: KB0THN - 14-Jan-2004 |
| http://archive.aprsworld.net provides hourly dumps of weather and position data in plain-text format. It is intended to be a long term archive of the APRS system. | |
| Move Complete | Posted by: KB0THN - 09-Dec-2003 |
| Both maps.aprsworld.net and db.aprsworld.net are happy in their new homes. The DNS has been changed to point at them and almost everything should be back to normal.
Currently I am aware that the track page and the 802.11 add page are broken. Please e-mail if anything else is not working. | |
| Server Move Update | Posted by: KB0THN - 08-Dec-2003 |
| I had some problems moving the servers, but now things are back on the right track.
The normal db.aprsworld.net is now physically moved to Iowa State University and running great. The facilities that we made available to me by Daryl Herzmann and Iowa Environmental Mesonet are excellent. The physical location is a computer room with dedicated air conditioning unit, raised flooring, and plenty of room to work. db.aprsworld.net and maps.aprsworld.net will be on a gigabit ethernet switch to the Iowa State University campus backbone. This will provide good bandwidth and low latency for internet users, and massive bandwidth for Internet2 users. I installed a Best ME850 extended run time UPS for the aprsworld equipment as well. It shouldn't be nescessary because the facility hasn't had any unscheduled power outages and it is about 500 feet from the power plant. A remote power switch will allow me to power cycle individual machines.
db.aprsworld.netI put a fresh Debian unstable install on it. All of the aprsworld machines (www, db, and maps) are now running Debian which should make things easier to administer. I removed the non-functional RAID array so I could troubleshoot it on another machine. I am in the process of performance tuning the machine and getting the database running again.
maps.aprsworld.netI accidentally left the hard drive for maps.aprsworld.net up in Minnesota. My mom was nice enough to run it into Jarvis Computer Software who sent it down to Ames. Then tragedy struck. While mounting the drive in a carrier it slid out and dropped about 2 feet to the floor. The blow was enough to really ruin the drive. There are physical chips on the platters where the heads struck. Needless to say, the data was not recoverable. The drive was only a few gigabytes, so that's not a big deal; the big deal was I lost the latest version of the map generating wrappers and software. Now I have a shinny new Seagate 120 GB Barracuda 7200 RPM IDE drive with 8 megabyte cache. I'm about to install Debian on it and start trying to reconsturct mapserver and the PHP code related to it. | |
| Scheduled Downtine | Posted by: KB0THN - 25-Nov-2003 |
| maps.aprsworld.net and db.aprsworld.net servers will be physically moved on Saturday, 29 Nov 2003 through Wednesday, 3 Dec 2003. I will try to have a backup machine online and providing standard web functionality, but long term data will not be available. | |
| Let there be lakes | Posted by: KB0THN - 25-Nov-2003 |
| I added some lakes to the maps.aprsworld.net maps. These are from 1:1M scale data, so they will not be visible when higher resolution water data is available.
The lakes added are: Great Salt Lake, Lake Powell, Salton Sea, Lake Okeechobee, Upper Red Lake, Lake Mead, Clarks Hill Lake, Lake of the Woods, Fort Peck Lake, Lake Oahe, Mille Lacs Lake, Lake Michigan, Yellowstone Lake, Lake Winnebago, Gayuga Lake, Lake Erie, Seneca Lake, Lake St. Clair, Keuka Lake, Lake Tahoe, Lake Barkley, Kentucky Lake, Lake Texoma, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Winnipesaukee, Lake Champlain, Lake Superior, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario. | |
| Time is now in UTC | Posted by: KB0THN - 21-Oct-2003 |
| I finally switched db.aprsworld.net and maps.aprsworld.net off of CDT and over to UTC time. Please let me know if this breaks anything. | |
| Weather Banners | Posted by: KB0THN - 10-Oct-2003 |
| I've put together a program that generates weather banners that can be included in your website. Here is a sample:
<IMG SRC="http://db.aprsworld.net/datamart/wx-image.php?call=kb0vyo-12&backgroundcolor=ffffff&textcolor=000000" WIDTH=600 HEIGHT=95 ALT="Current Conditions at KB0VYO-12">
You can specify a label parameters that will override the callsign, latitude, and longitude information that usually appears. The colors can be ommited or hex RGB tripplets can be specified. The icon will normally indicate sunny, however when there has been rain reported in the last hour it will show a rain icon, or if the temperature is below freezing it and there was rain in the last hour it will show a snowing icon. | |
| DCC Paper and Presentation Online | Posted by: KB0THN - 25-Sep-2003 |
| My presentation and some photos from DCC are now online.
| |
| Emergency Beacon to E-Mail | Posted by: KB0THN - 03-Sep-2003 |
| Certain APRS packets can be marked as EMERGENCY packets. They are designed to be sent as a digital equivilent of a SOS signal. A typical APRS client will center on the station sending the EMERGENCY packet and attempt to attract the operators attention. aprsworld.net is proud to introduce a gateway that will automatically e-mail you when such a packet is received in your area. You can specify the distance from your station to receive notices about EMERGENCY packets from, or you can be notified about all emergency packets.
An e-mail message will be sent out whenever the uppercase string "EMERGENCY" is contained in a packet. This is most typically seen with MIC-E packets, but any packet that contains it will trigger this system. You will receive an e-mail each time the emergency station transmit an EMERGENCY packet.
| |
| http://db.aprsworld.net/datamart/emergency-e-mail.php | |
| Work under way! | Posted by: KB0THN - 09-Jul-2003 |
| I've been working as much as I can on aprsworld.net recently.
I've been concentrating on:
A side result of this is that I've been fiddling with indexes. Hopefully that fiddling will help with common queries and the new weather and tracking stuff. MySQL has scaled incredibly well, but (re)building indexes remains very slow. The large tables take hours to index. I'm looking for suggestions and feature requests now. If you are interested in contributing to aprsworld I'd love to have you on board. -Jim | |
| Zoomable maps for older browsers | Posted by: KB0THN - 09-Apr-2003 |
| I've known for quite a while that the zoomable maps don't work for older browsers. I fixed a little bit of HTML, so they should now work for all browsers that support JavaScript. It now works properly with Netscape 4.7. | |
| New case installed | Posted by: KB0THN - 31-Mar-2003 |
| The new case has been modified and installed. I posted a bunch of pictures which you can find from the link below.
| |
| http://jamesj.jarviscomputer.com/gallery/aprsworld/ | |
