The Station
Amateur radio is the original decentralized network — no towers to pay, no accounts to lock you out. This station does three jobs: it feeds the national APRS network as a round-the-clock gateway, it's becoming a local crossband repeater so a handheld can reach a distant machine, and — the fun part — it bridges radio messages straight into a group chat and back.
The Hardware
Yaesu FTM-2980 APRS
A 2 m FM mobile dedicated full-time to the APRS gateway on 144.39 MHz — the always-on ears of the station.
Yaesu FTM-310DR BOT / REPEATER
C4FM/FM dual-band mobile, crossband-repeat capable — reserved for the local crossband repeater and the coming voice-command bot.
ZimaBoard + Direwolf
A fanless x86 board runs Direwolf, a software TNC decoding 1200-baud packet on 144.39 MHz — receiving, digipeating, and gating APRS between the air and the internet.
DigiRig interface
A compact sound-card + PTT link between the FTM-310DR and the ZimaBoard — the wiring for the voice bot and data modes to come.
On the Road
Two mobile rigs ride along — both with built-in APRS and GPS, so they beacon their position as they move (which is how the farm knows a truck is heading home) and let me send APRS or work the repeater from anywhere.
Yaesu FTM-400 F-250
C4FM dual-band with a color touchscreen, built-in APRS TNC and GPS — the work-truck rig.
Yaesu FTM-500 SANTA FE
The newer dual-band C4FM mobile, built-in APRS and GPS — the daily-driver rig.
What We're Doing
APRS Gateway & Digipeater LIVE
A 24/7 node in the worldwide APRS network — decoding local packets, repeating them for stations that can't reach far, and feeding them to the internet backbone.
APRS ↔ Discord Bridge LIVE
Radio text messages land in a group chat; typed replies go back out over the air — to one operator or to everyone. Delivery-confirmed. Detailed below.
Local Crossband Repeater IN PROGRESS
Linking a low-power handheld up to a distant repeater (the W4CAT machine in La Vergne) by relaying 70 cm ↔ 2 m through the home station. Radio in hand, programming underway.
Voice-Command Bot ROADMAP
Talk to the station over the air — ask for weather, homelab status, or the day's duck fact — and hear a spoken answer. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech, entirely self-hosted.
Feature: Radio Meets Chat
APRS can send text messages, but typing on a radio keypad is miserable. The phone is great at typing; the radio is great at reaching people off-grid. This bridge — a small program on the ZimaBoard, tapping the packet stream read-only — lets each do what it's good at. There are two ways to put words on the air, and APRS handles them differently.
Reaching one operator — directed & confirmed
You type a bare callsign in chat. The bridge figures out which of that person's radios is actually on the air, sends it over the internet to a gateway near them, and waits for their radio's automatic acknowledgment — retrying until it lands.
1:1 · Directed message
Bare callsign in, delivery confirmation out.
No ack? It retries on a decaying schedule (~5 tries over ~13 min, the APRS convention) then reports plainly that it may not have reached them. You always know.
Reaching everyone — the bulletin
A bulletin is APRS's broadcast: addressed to a bulletin line instead of a person, it appears on every listening station's board. No acknowledgment — you can't collect a receipt from "everyone" — so it's sent once and seen widely.
1:∞ · Bulletin
One message, no addressee, no ack.
When someone calls you
Inbound is the mirror — and it fans out to wherever you'll notice, plus a bit of good manners:
Built entirely on gear already on the network — no cloud services, no monthly fees. Python on a ZimaBoard, Direwolf, APRS-IS, and Discord, wired together.