LoraAPRS
Besides the classic APRS on 2 m, same OMs experiment with off the shelf LoRa transceivers.
Requirements:
- PlatformIO,
- Lora APRS Tracker and/or
- Lora APRS iGate.
PlatformIO core
Most installation descriptions describe the installation using a full installation of PlatformIO with IDE. But, the installation is also possible on the command with just PlatformIO Core. Just follow one of their installation methods. For example:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/platformio/platformio-core-installer/master/get-platformio.py -O get-platformio.py python3 get-platformio.py
Installation on the tracker
After the installation of platform.io, we can directly call pio. Alternatively, you can add it to the PATH. The environment is specfied with -e. You can see the enviroments in the platformio.ini file.
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t cleanall ~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t upload
The configuration must be modified in data/tracker.json before installation.
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t buildfs ~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e ttgo-t-beam-v1 -t uploadfs
Installation on the iGate
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t cleanall ~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t upload
The configuration must be modified in data/is-cfg.json before installation.
~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t buildfs ~/.platformio/penv/bin/pio run -e lora_board -t uploadfs
Telemetry
I modified the code to send proper APRS telemetry messages of type PRAM, UNIT, EQNS and T. You find this source code on GitHub. The core frequency is reduced to 80 MHz and the NMEA parser is interrupt based. Thus, the power consumptino is reduced by around 20 percent.