APRS Notifications

Overview

• Source: http://www.aprs.org/
• Image Support: No
• Attachment Support: No
• Message Character Limits:
  • Body: 67
• Supported Body Format(s):
  • ✓TEXT
• Build Your Apprise URL

Account Setup

• You need to be a licensed Ham Radio Operator in order to use this plugin.
• Bring your own APRS-IS passcode. If you don’t know what this is or how to get one, then this plugin is not for you.

Syntax

Valid syntax is as follows:

• aprs://{userid}:{password}@{callsign}
• aprs://{userid}:{password}@{callsign}?locale={locale_code}
• aprs://{userid}:{password}@{callsign1}/{callsign2}/{callsignN}
• aprs://{userid}:{password}@{callsign1}/{callsign2}/{callsignN}?locale={locale_code}

Parameter Breakdown

Variable	Required	Description
userid	Yes	Your APRS call sign. This is the call sign that will send the message.
password	Yes	Numeric APRS passcode, corresponding to userid. Read-only access to APRS-IS (passcode == -1) is not supported.
callsign	Yes	One or more target amateur-radio call signs.
delay	No	Extra delay between messages, from 0.0 (default) to 5.0 seconds. This is added to the built-in 0.8-second delay. Integer and decimal values are accepted.
locale	No	Your nearest APRS-IS T2 server: NOAM, SOAM, EURO, AUNZ, or ASIA. Use ROTA for rotate.aprs2.net when you do not need a specific region. The default is EURO.

Global Parameters

Variable	Description
overflow	Controls messages that exceed a service’s documented limit. The default is upstream. 👉 upstream: Send one message without splitting or truncating it for that limit. 👉 truncate: Keep the portion that fits and discard the rest. 👉 split: Prefer a readable break, fall back to a hard boundary, and send every part in order. Splitting undeclared or structured content is best effort. Use upstream when the body must remain one intact document.
format	This parameter can be set to either text, html, or markdown. Some services support the ability to post content by several different means. The default of this varies (it can be one of the 3 mentioned at any time depending on which service you choose). You can optionally force this setting to stray from the defaults if you wish. If the service doesn’t support different types of transmission formats, then this field is ignored.
verify	External requests made to secure locations (such as through the use of https) will have certificates associated with them. By default, Apprise will verify that these certificates are valid; if they are not then no notification will be sent to the source. In some occasions, a user might not have a certificate authority to verify the key against or they trust the source; in this case you will want to set this flag to no. By default it is set to yes.
redirect	By default, Apprise will follow HTTP redirects (3xx responses) issued by the remote server, matching the behaviour of the underlying requests library. If you want to prevent custom headers and credentials from being forwarded to destinations that differ from the original URL, set this to no. By default it is set to yes.
cto	This stands for Socket Connect Timeout. This is the number of seconds Requests will wait for your client to establish a connection to a remote machine (corresponding to the connect()) call on the socket. The default value is 4.0 seconds.
rto	This stands for Socket Read Timeout. This is the number of seconds the client will wait for the server to send a response. The default value is 4.0 seconds.
emojis	Enable Emoji support (such as providing :+1: would translate to 👍). By default this is set to no. Note: Depending on server side settings, the administrator has the power to disable emoji support at a global level; but default this is not the case.
tz	Identify the IANA Time Zone Database you wish to operate as. By default this is detected based on the configuration the server hosting Apprise is running on. You can set this to things like America/Toronto, or any other properly formated Timezone describing your area.
retry	The number of additional delivery attempts to make after the first failure before giving up. Accepts an integer in the range 0 to 10. The default is 0 (no retries — a single attempt is made). When combined with wait, Apprise pauses the specified number of seconds between each attempt.
wait	The number of seconds to pause between retry attempts. Accepts a decimal value in the range 0.0 to 20.0; integer values are promoted to float automatically. The default is 0.5. This value is only meaningful when retry is greater than zero — a service with retry=0 makes exactly one attempt regardless of the wait value.
optional	When set to yes, a delivery failure for this service is silently absorbed. The overall notify() call still evaluates as true even if this endpoint was unreachable, provided that every required (non-optional) service in the same batch succeeded. Setting this flag does not skip delivery or bypass retry logic — all configured retry attempts are still made before the failure is absorbed. By default this is set to no, meaning every failure is propagated to the caller.

Constraints

• APRS control characters ({}|~, see APRS101.pdf chapter 14 pg. 71) will be removed from the message body if present.
• If your message exceeds 67 characters, the plugin will automatically truncate the content to APRS’s maximum message length.
• An APRS message is a single line, so your title and every line of your message are joined together with a space before the 67 character limit is applied.
• For messages, it is recommended to stick to the English alphabet as APRS is limited to ASCII 7-bit. The plugin will try to “translate” any UTF-8 message to plain ASCII with the help of the unidecode module - but there will be no guarantee that the output is going to be usable.
• This plugin DOES honor call sign SSIDs, meaning that e.g. targets DF1JSL-1 and DF1JSL-9 are NOT identical and will result in two APRS messages.
• All messages generated by this plugin are going to lack an APRS message ID (see APRS101.pdf chapter 14 pg. 71). As the plugin’s communication with APRS-IS is unidirectional, Apprise will be unable to honor any APRS ack/rej responses sent by the target call sign (aka the target ham radio device).
• APRS Bulletins (see APRS101.pdf chapter 14 pg. 73) are not supported.
• With great (ham radio) power comes great responsibility; do not use this plugin for spamming other ham radio operators. Everything that you send to the APRS-IS server will get broadcast via the APRS / Ham Radio network.
• In order to gain access to APRS-IS, you need to be a licensed ham radio operator.
• The plugin uses its own APRS device identifier (APPRIS; see https://github.com/aprsorg/aprs-deviceid for details). This identifier is unique to each software/device that is allowed to communicate with the APRS network and must not get modified in any way UNLESS you clone this plugin and use its code outside of Apprise - in this case, please request your very own device identifier.
• Additional (technical) constraints: see plugin’s header section. Usually, you should not be required to change these settings.

Examples

Send an APRS Notification:

# Assuming our {userid} is df1jsl-15
# Assuming our {password} is 12345
# Assuming our {callsign} is df1jsl-9
# {locale} is not set; using 'euro.aprs2.net' as target server default
#
apprise -vv -b "Test Message Body" \
   "aprs://df1jsl-15:12345@df1jsl-9"

# Assuming our {userid} is df1jsl-15
# Assuming our {password} is 12345
# Assuming our {callsign}s are df1jsl-9, df1jsl-8 and df1jsl-7
# {locale} is not set; using 'euro.aprs2.net' as target server default
#
# This will result in three target call signs as the plugin
# is going to honor the call sign's SSID information
#
apprise -vv -b "Test Message Body" \
   aprs://df1jsl-15:12345@df1jsl-9/df1jsl-8/df1jsl-7

# Assuming our {userid} is df1jsl-15
# Assuming our {password} is 12345
# Assuming our {callsign} is df1jsl-9
# Assuming our {locale} is NOAM --> maps server URL to 'noam.aprs2.net', see https://www.aprs2.net/
apprise -vv -b "Test Message Body" \
   "aprs://df1jsl-15:12345@df1jsl-9?locale=NOAM"