Beaconing

Goal: show up on other people’s maps — interval, speed tiers and the RF switch in one pass.

Cadence: pick the interval#

Settings → Beacon → Enable position beacon (on by default).
Interval defaults to 60 s — APRS-IS asks mobiles not to go below 60 s; the hard minimum is 5 s (smaller values are rejected by validation). APRS is a shared network: much faster noticeably loads the servers and the UI warns you.
Turn off speed / course / battery if you prefer shorter frames and less exposure.
Hate timers? Disable automatic reporting and use manual beacon on the home page.

⏱️

The home page shows the cadence: countdown to the next beacon and the number sent — watch those two numbers to know whether it is still beaconing.

On the move: speed tiers#

Settings → Beacon → Smart beaconing (speed tiers) on.
Configure up to five tiers: the faster you go, the more often it reports; each tier has its own interval and icon (empty icon = “my symbol”).
Each tier also takes a distance (metres, 0 = off): it beacons when the timer expires or you have moved far enough.
…and a turn threshold (degrees, 0 = off): a point is also added once you turn past it — only while moving (heading is noise when parked) and at most once every 20 s.
Park and it drops to the slow tier by itself — no manual switching.

📏

Why “or by distance” at all? Timed beaconing has an inherent gap: how far you travelled has nothing to do with how long it took. A 300 s interval is plenty in a traffic jam, while 60 km/h covers a kilometre in 60 s — and that stretch becomes a straight line on aprs.fi with every corner flattened. Defaults follow “the distance this tier's speed covers in one interval”: 200 m stationary / 250 m walking / 400 m city / 700 m highway. Fast, and points are added by distance; stopped, the distance stops growing and it falls back to pure timing.

The turn trigger covers a different road: on mountain roads you are slow, so the distance threshold takes ages to reach, yet hairpins are exactly where the track matters most — while cruising straight the heading never changes and it never fires.

⚠️

Tier intervals obey the same 5 s floor and server-load concern; a 3 s tier is rejected by validation.

When there is no GPS#

Situation	Use	Where
Indoors / desktop demo	Manual location: type coordinates or pick a point on the map	Settings → Beacon → Location source (simulated)
Weak GPS, cell coverage	GPS + network	Settings → Beacon → Location mode
No positioning at all	Demo data (fake stations/packets)	Settings → Advanced

📍

Honest note on network positioning: cell/Wi-Fi fixes are hundreds of metres off by nature, so “my position flies around” is not a bug. The app only falls back to network after GPS has been quiet for 2 minutes, never writes those fixes to your track, and drops them while GPS is fresh. Want accuracy? Pick GPS only.

Stationary damping: the marker stops jittering while you stand still (sliding-median plus a drift test); when moving, nothing is smoothed — every frame is shown as it arrived.

What a beacon frame looks like#

Position frames this app sends (examples taken from beacon_format_test and afsk_test):

# over APRS-IS:
BG7LZG-9>APALOC,TCPIP*:!3904.25N/11624.44E>123/045/A=000100 Bat:88% APRSlocus v1.6.67
# over RF (TNC):
BG7LZQ-9>APALOC,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1:!2230.00N/11400.00E>test

APALOC is APRSlocus’s tocall — subscribe to it on third-party trackers to find “same app” stations.
The RF path is the digipeater path you configured on the TNC page (default WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1); over APRS-IS it is automatically TCPIP*.
The comment (battery/version) follows the position string with no space — required by APRS101 and assumed by parsers.

✅

Verify: send one manual beacon → the Packets tab shows your frame; a few minutes later search your callsign on aprs.fi — same coordinates.