Frequently asked questions about APRStac.
APRStac is designed as a tool to facilitate emergency communication during natural disasters. For that reason, it needs to remain simple to use and cross-platform, while being versatile in its transport methods. Today, the application ships as a single binary around 10 MB with no installation requirements. It will remain lightweight, and will be built in a way that a non-ham can be told to sit down and immediately have situational awareness. Most design choices are made against that goal. It is not designed to tinker with, and it is not built as a DX maker, contact logger, satellite tracker, or any other feature you can imagine. It is a tool with a purpose: to provide situational awareness to disaster response personnel using established and tested methods and protocols.
Not at this time. If you haven't done much software development, it is hard to understand the impact AI has had on open source software. APRStac was built to be a stable tool used in emergency communications and natural disasters. Because of that, code must be reviewed, and features must be functional in off-grid communications. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for amateur radio tool development, which is a good thing — but the overall health and quality of open source amateur radio software has degraded as a result. This is due to feature bloat and contributions or forks from those with a lack of programming experience, leading to code being merged without review. This is on top of projects being bombarded with AI-hallucinated security reports and fix pull requests, which waste developer time and energy. To keep APRStac stable and mission-focused, it will remain closed source at this time.
The desktop version (Windows, Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi, etc.) has the full set of features and ports. The APRStac Mobile edition currently has most of them, but lacks the Serial KISS port and the ability to gate from APRS-IS to RF. It also does not include weather sensor collection or packet statistics, and it cannot host or connect to BBS or Fileshare systems. Mobile does have one port that the desktop version doesn't: Bluetooth Meshtastic.
The plan is to support APRS over Meshtastic, including position reports, messaging, status beacons, and the connected modes (BBS and Fileshare). This keeps things neatly segmented within the amateur radio ecosystem. In practice, there is nothing native Meshtastic can offer over APRS-over-Meshtastic that is not already supported by the APRStac desktop and mobile applications. Packets are rebroadcast by the Meshtastic firmware just the same as native Meshtastic messages. At the end of the day, non-hams can technically use APRStac and connect it to their Meshtastic devices to communicate across the platform all the same.
If digipeating is enabled and a packet arrives at any port with WIDEn-N, TRACEn-n, or RELAY in its path, it will be sent across all other ports that have digipeating enabled. This allows, for example, KISS over FM to be digipeated over Meshtastic LoRa, or an APRS frame sent via Meshtastic LoRa to be digipeated over IP.
Yes. There is a plan to add BBS-to-BBS connections in the future to allow mail forwarding between systems. I have not yet decided whether this will be backwards compatible with the traditional NET/ROM approach to mail forwarding.
APRStac is designed to be used in a field environment. There are very few features which require actual internet — namely Discord notifications and the APRS-IS port. Those are "nice to have," but should never be depended on for any emergency response or communication. There is a spike in APRS bot integrations that make use of the APRS-IS network, especially given the use of AI in tool development. These are fun toys, but not something I would ever rely on in an emergency communication platform.
Yes. Other amateur-radio-centric transport methods are planned to be added as ports over the next few months. This will include the ability to exchange messages and positions, and to digipeat through other amateur radio protocols such as JS8 and PSK31. These will roll out as stability is established with each new version.
You can request a feature through the ModernHam Discord. The best way to decide whether a feature is right for APRStac is to ask yourself: "If my friend JimBob was put on APRStac to help communicate during a natural disaster, would this feature help him?" If the answer is yes, follow up with: "What problem is this feature solving for JimBob?" As amateur radio operators, we love to tinker and hack around with things, and it is natural to want to find new, innovative ways to do neat stuff. But that isn't what APRStac is for. APRStac exists to solve the problem of communication during a natural disaster, providing situational awareness to response personnel.