Setup Screen

In order to perform some of it's calculations, AprsNetSpy (ANS) required your home latitude and longitude. Pressing the set button doesn't set them, I'll have to come up with some other name for that thing, but if you press it, you can enter your lat/long by entering it in in degrees, minutes and seconds or any decimal sub group of that basic format.

There are some functions that require an Amateur Radio Callsign in order to function properly. If you aren't licenced, leave this set to NOCALL. It isn't a good idea to make up something as some of the functions, most notably using the Internet, won't work properly if you attempt to enter a value that doesn't parse out properly to an amateur radio callsign. NOCALL usually passes by these checks with certain limitations.

So, if you've got one, enter your callsign.

To set a Comm Port/Baud Rate or and Internet URL and port click "Setup Communications Data Port". You will be whisked to another screen where you can enter/select that data. See the Comm TCP/IP Setup page for an overview of that.

When you log packets to a track file the program calculated the distance between the previously received packet from a station and it's current packet. You can set a minimum distance to eliminate drift in a GPS receiver, not much of that, or at least not to any great magnitude of distance. I have it set very high above. You might want to keep it around a tenth of a mile or so. If packets repetitively arrive that are separated by their "forebears" by a distance not exceeding this minimum distance, they are not logged. This only affects the track log file. You can still capture a CSV file of every packet. After all, not all weather stations move around much, but we're still interested in anything they have to say.

Maximum Stations. Well, this program is primarily intended for use on a local RF network, so this shouldn't be too much of a concern. However, you can enter in any number here and the program will then "age" the oldest stations in the database (oldest in the sense of not being heard in a while, not first in first out) by tossing them and bringing in new blood. I rarely run the program on the net, and when I do, it is almost for the targeted purpose of gathering packets from some small filtered group so I haven't much experience letting this thing fill up. However, I did once connect to an unfiltered feed and let it run for a few hours. Nothing seemed to bother the progrm with the expected exception of it's tossing out old stations once the limit of 500 stations had been reached.. Frankly, around the local RF neighborhood, 150 would probably keep a very accurate database running only scrolling off the DB stations that had actually turned their systems off. And they probably wouldn't disappear for hours. This in the Denver metro area, which is moderately busy... see this page for a few snapshots taken by ANS of that activity.

Minimum Interval for Duplicate Packet Checking. Set the number of seconds you wish to have ANS check for duplicates. If a packet arrives with the same information (even if it comes from a different path) within that window and it matches a previously received packet within the window then it is considered a duplicate and tossed if you have set the program to count only unique packets (Station Screen). Usually you'll want to count the full load on the system but, I placed the ability to screen out duplicates for a friend.

Alert sound. You can select a wave file and it will play when a particular station you set in your alert list appears on the screen.

Spread Sheet path. This should be the path to a Spread Sheet program that will allow a filename to be passed to it via command line (or drag and drop). Most will handle it fine. You can then look at activity from your spreadsheet. WARNING. Most spreadsheet programs lock files when they open them. Because of this, when you click Spreadsheet in ANS and select a file to load, the program will create a temporary copy of the file and load that copy. This will allow ANS to continue writing to the actual log while you have the copy open in a spreadsheet program.

If your TNC is the data source, the commport and baud rate are correctly entered and the TNC is in the Command mode (cmd:) when ANS starts then you can indicated two script files here. The startup file will send commands to configure your TNC to work with ANS, and the Shutdown file will send commands to the TNC just prior to shutting down ANS to restore it to a state you want it to be in for "normal" operations. No scripts are provided. By and large, ANS should work with any TNC that is not in the KISS mode, that is, the TNC is doing all the packet ax.25 work, and is in command mode.

While it is running ANS aggregates lots of information on each station it hears and on the entire network as a whole (as seen from its local perspective). If you click on the Network Summary Spreadsheet, Station Summary Spreadsheet or Digipeater Summary checkboxes to activate them then each time you shut down ANS, those files will be written. Their contents are outlined on the Report Files page and the Digipeater Data Page.

Auto Logging -  If you have lists of commonly logged stations then you can have those lists be activated upon program startup so that any stations in them will be logged automatically. You can activate the lists from the Logging Screen too. Where ever they are activated, the settings are saved and will be used next time you start ANS.

ANS counts packets for several different categories of APRS packet. These totals are used on the Main Screen's second tab (By Time). You can place a checkmark in the "Automatically Log Packets Per Minute data" checkbox and each minute the program will update a log file with this information. You can then later chart it if you wish. See the Charting page for an example of a very detailed chart of a 15 hour window of data.

You can specify three separate folder locations:

Station Logging - All log files will be placed in this folder. This includes the summary reports as well as individual station logs and full captures.

Street Atlas - Specifies the location of your Street Atlas program. This makes it slightly simpler to load an SA lat/long file which contains the locations of each station heard.

Temporary Tracks - Because these files can become quite numerous, I've enabled a folder to be designated specially for them. These files contain logs of EVERY moving station. Each time a packet is received and the location data differs (in distance) from the previously received packet by the amount specified on Tab 1 of the setup screen then that data is written to a log file. Be careful with this option if you don't want to eat up disk space.