VK4RDB-1 Receive only station located at Mt Cotton

On behalf of BDARS, David VK4ZF has kindly put together this receiving station for the Mt Cotton Facility.

This receiver monitors the standard VHF APRS frequency used in Australia 145.175MHz with 5 kHz deviation

About the station

See a live map of the latest APRS traffic into this station: APRS Last heard

The heart of the station consists of a very low low cost RTL-SDR Dongle. This software defined radio is based on the popular RTL2832U integrated circuit wideband receiver, but has several additional features which improve performance and make it more ham friendly.

The receiver plugs into a Raspberry Pi microcomputer via USB. The Raspberry Pi runs a Linux operating system and and the Direwolf APRS decoding application.

As the station is co-located with our 2m FM repeater, the APRS front-end antenna system incorporates a resonant cavity notch filter to reduce the effect of overload from the nearby transmitter.

More information on APRS (from Wikipedia):-

Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is an amateur radio-based system for real time digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area.^[1] Data can include object Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, weather station telemetry, text messages, announcements, queries, and other telemetry. APRS data can be displayed on a map, which can show stations, objects, tracks of moving objects, weather stations, search and rescue data, and direction finding data.