Announcing Trackulator, free open source web based APRS client

http://www.trackulator.com/

Try it out at: http://www.trackulator.com/tracku.cgi
% is the wildcard although it currently will only use the first callsign found.

Get it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/trackulator/

Trackulator depends on Ham::APRS::Parser, get it from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ham-aprs-parser/

A few technical notes
I had to pare down the schema quite a bit, it had some nice features in it originally but it was putting way too much load on my server. Granted I'm taking a full APRS-IS stream, if you use a filter it will be a lot less data. If you hook it up to your TNC and just use it on your local APRS net the load on your computer should be negligible.

I'm planning to incorporate PostGIS, I just haven't got around to it yet.

Ham::APRS::Parser still needs some work, it's pretty ornery when it comes to malformed APRS packets, or APRS formats that it's not yet familiar with. I have to wrap calls to it in eval{} in case it dies.

There's still quite a bit of functionality missing before Trackulator will be competitive with findu.com but we can get there. The nice thing about Trackulator is that if you wish you can hook it up to your TNC and just use it to monitor your local APRS traffic, and query it however you like using raw SQL if you want. Plus it's free, open source, yadda yadda.

73 and enjoy de n1ywb

From README.txt

===================================

Trackulator v0.02
(C) 2005 Jeff Laughlin, [email protected]
http://www.trackulator.com

Trackulator aims to be a free open source APRS web client.

THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE! It's buggy and I know it. Please send patches, not bug reports.

Requirements
* PostgreSQL
* Perl
* Ham::APRS::Parser.pm (Get from http://aprs.n1ywb.com)
* DBI.pm
* DBD::Pg.pm
* CGI.pm
* Internet connection (For google maps)
* aprsistest.pl (In the Ham::APRS::Parser tarball)

There are three main parts
* trackud.pl
* tracku.cgi
* schema.sql

trackud.pl is the Trackulator daemon. It reads raw APRS packets on stdin, calls Ham::APRS::Parser to parse them, the inserts the bits into the PostgreSQL database.

tracku.cgi is the front end. It queries the database and maps stuff using google maps.

schema.sql defines the trackulator postgresql backend.

To use Trackulator, first you need a working PostgreSQL installation. Then run
psql -f schema.sql
to import the Trackulator schema into your postgresql database. If you have problems with this command, please read the PostgreSQL documentation in it's entirety and check your postgresql setup thoroughly before contacting me.

Then start the trackulator daemon. In order to get the full APRS-IS feed into the database, use this command
perl aprsistest.pl | perl -I . trackud.pl
The -I tells perl where to look for the Ham/APRS/Parser.pm directory. You should now be getting a rapidly expanding screen full of warnings and errors from the APRS parser (this is alpha software after all). If you get errors from the Perl DBI, please let me know. Otherwise, ignore the errors, I already know about them. You can just redirect them to /dev/null or something, or do this:
perl aprsistest.pl | nohup perl -I . trackud.pl &
Which will cause the daemon to run in the background and send all output to nohup.out. Careful, nohup.out could get pretty big.

I developed this with PostgreSQL. It might work with other RDBMS's but then again it might not, I wouldn't know so don't ask, but if you have success with another one please let me know about it.

License:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Hi Jim,

It's still in alpha, there's a lot of work yet to be done and a lot functionality still missing. Eventually I hope it becomes at least as good as, if not better than findu.com. I operate under the credo of "release early, release often".

I went with PostgreSQL because
1) It's an extremely reliable and feature rich heavyweight multiuser RDBMS system that takes care of problems like concurrency for me so I don't have to and offers room for future growth.
2) SQL in general will give us a lot of flexability in the types of queries we can perform against the database.
3) PostgreSQL has the PostGIS extension which adds data types, index functions, and operators for complex geometric and geographic operations. For example, with PostGIS it would be trivial to get a set of all APRS stations within any polygon such as a range report, NWS watchbox, or any other geographic area that can be described as a polygon with any number of points.
4) Why NOT use SQL? It's the standard database query language. If PostgreSQL is too onerous you could try to make it go with SQLite or something.

I do not know about this, I hope to start trying to soon as it is the sort of thing I do at work.

I do RF coverage studies and we have developed our own software to do such work, it has evolved to where all transactions go through the db, even if I just want to run a quick test on a single point the data gathering piece talks to the db and then I can look at the data with ANY tool I want and not have to worry about the rf tool and the data manipulation tool talking to each other, the db becomes the 'dmark' between the rf tool and the data manipulation tools, and besides you get a history just in case you need it later for whatever reason, and believe me you always find a reason to have to go back and look at it.

Now if we can just get our ham radios to put out RSSI and other environmental data in a common format, then I can run me a amateur radio on a amateur channel while gathering stats on commercial stuff and gather a bit of data on ham networks... Of course given the grand way in which the manufacturers work together that will happen when hell freezes over... B-b;;;;,,,...

Chuck Hast 
To paraphrase my flight instructor;
"the only dumb question is the one you DID NOT ask resulting in my going
out and having to identify your bits and pieces in the midst of torn
and twisted metal."