Configuring the Anytone 878 and Pi-Star to pass and receive APRS traffic for either Digital APRS or Analogue APRS can be a bit challenging. There are youtube videos; some are good, some are not. I watched many :-). I decided to piece together the best of what I watched and read to help me remember what I learned. I am getting older and being able to retain configuration I do infrequently posses a challenge.
I hope this guide (see attached) provides you with the necessary information to configure your Digital APRS and Pi-Star successfully. Hope to see you on http://aprs.fi .
Anytone 878 APRS and Pi-Star Configpdf
regards,
Brian Waterworth
VE3IBW
Brian,
I'll watch the video and maybe my question will be answered there, but what is the difference between Analog APRS and Digital APRS, since APRS is all digital anyway? Are they actually transmitted on the same frequency? 144.390MHz?
Mike
You are right, APRS is indeed digital within and at the gates to the aprs-is network. How that digital signal gets there is the difference. I have another diagram I can post that shows this better. The concept of digital APRS as I contrast it to analogue is that digital aprs flows through the same DMR network as voice packets. DMR APRS is sent as a DMR SMS message and is routed to the aprs-is gateway that brandmeister maintains on each of its master servers. Also there is no standard frequency nor digipeating capability such as found with analogue APRS. As long as the DMR network allows for APRS traffic, you can be connected to any DMR repeater or hotspot frequency And send APRS packets to aprs-is.
Here is a document to help show the flow of APRS messages. There are two examples. The first is from analogue to DMR. The second is from DMR to analogue. As we will learn, briefly, at Tuesday's club meeting (Nov 2019), most DMR networks do not pass APRS traffic. However, the most popular DMR Network (my opinion), Brandmeister, does allow APRS traffic.
regards,
Brian Waterworth
VE3IBW
OK, so APRS data just gets sent along with all of the other packets of data that are already being sent with voice content, hence no other specific frequency required. Understood, thanks for clarification. Neat!