07-15-2015, 12:51 PM
APRS was invented and is maintained by amateur radio people for civilian use. Bits of it connect to the Internet but it's operation does not depend upon the Internet (save for the bits that you need to see where you are going on line).
It does depend upon GPS for the tracking part if you wish to use that feature (that is the part that got me into ham radio) but being a packet protocol there is a messaging side too. Folks attach their weather stations to the system so you can get real time weather at a particular location.
I had a buddy that was a Ham back in high school and tried to interest me but you had know Morse Code; which I had to do for Boy Scouts and that was such a poor experience I avoided it like the plague for over 45 years.
When I was in college, for the second go around, one of the kids in our program was a ham and he had a new fangled 2 meter radio. Boy that thing was cool! Still, I resisted.
Then the Internet came along and that pretty much took any wind out of my sails for the ham radio thing. Now that I'm retired I figured why not!
It does depend upon GPS for the tracking part if you wish to use that feature (that is the part that got me into ham radio) but being a packet protocol there is a messaging side too. Folks attach their weather stations to the system so you can get real time weather at a particular location.
I had a buddy that was a Ham back in high school and tried to interest me but you had know Morse Code; which I had to do for Boy Scouts and that was such a poor experience I avoided it like the plague for over 45 years.
When I was in college, for the second go around, one of the kids in our program was a ham and he had a new fangled 2 meter radio. Boy that thing was cool! Still, I resisted.
Then the Internet came along and that pretty much took any wind out of my sails for the ham radio thing. Now that I'm retired I figured why not!