Digipeater

A digipeater repeats packets it hears back onto the air, so stations that can't reach the network on their own reach it through somebody else. APRS Connect can be one, using the radio you already have connected.

The digipeater is part of APRS Connect Pro. It also needs a radio channel, which Pro covers as well — APRS-IS cannot carry a digipeat, because the whole point is putting the packet back on the frequency it came from.

It is a different job from the IGate, and the two are independent. A gate carries the local channel to the internet. A digipeater extends the local channel itself. You can run either, both, or neither.

Fill-in or wide-area

This is the whole choice for most people, and the app asks it as one setting.

Fill-in answers WIDE1-1 and nothing wider, and it waits five seconds before transmitting. If another digipeater repeats the packet while it waits, yours stays quiet. That waiting is what makes a fill-in worth running from a phone: it transmits only where nothing else covered the packet, so it fills holes instead of adding a second copy of everything the hilltop digipeater already carried.

Wide-area answers WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1 and WIDE2-2, immediately. That is a real digipeater's job, and it belongs to a fixed station with height, a proper antenna and mains power. A handheld or a phone on a dashboard running wide-area adds duplicates across a whole town.

Wide-area is also a decision with neighbours in it. Too many wide-area digipeaters in one area degrade the network rather than improve it: the same packet gets repeated by several stations at once, they collide with each other, and the channel carries more copies and fewer distinct packets. Plan one with your local group rather than switching it on because the coverage looks thin from where you are standing.

If you are not sure which you are, you are a fill-in.

What it does to the path

Every packet carries a list of the stations it would like to be repeated by. A digipeater acts on exactly one entry: the first one nobody has used yet.

When your digipeater answers, your callsign goes into the path, marked as used. That is not decoration — it is what lets anyone reading the packet see the route it actually took, and it is what stops your own digipeater repeating its own output forever.

WIDE1-1 becomes N0CALL-3* — the request is spent, so your callsign replaces it.
WIDE2-2 becomes N0CALL-3*,WIDE2-1 — one hop used, one still asked for.
A packet routed to you by name becomes N0CALL-3* the same way.

Your digipeater never answers a hop that sits behind another unused one. If a station asked for WIDE1-1,N0CALL-3, they asked for a fill-in first and you second, and jumping that queue would discard routing that wasn't yours to override.

What it will never repeat

These rules run before any of your rules, and nothing on the settings screen can reach past them.

Anything that didn't arrive on a radio. Packets from APRS-IS, and packets read out of a capture file, are never put on the air.
Anything already carrying your callsign as a used hop. You have handled this packet once. This is the rule that stops a loop.
Your own transmissions.
Anything with TCPIP or TCPXX in the path. It has been on the internet.
Anything from a station you have blocked. Blocking a station elsewhere in the app stops their messages reaching you; here it also stops your transmitter repeating their traffic under your callsign. The packet is still logged, because it was on the air.
Anything asking for more than three hops. WIDE7-7 is the packet that takes a network down, and no rule here can raise that ceiling.

There is also a rate cap and a 30-second window that suppresses an identical packet. Both are backstops against a bug or a loop, not throughput settings, so neither is adjustable.

Traffic another IGate has put on the air — a packet wrapped inside that gate's own, asking for WIDE1-1 like anything else — is repeated, the same as any digipeater would. It is an ordinary frame on the air, and the fill-in help it is asking for is the whole point. Your own gate's transmissions are refused by their source, not their shape.

Rules

Choosing Custom shows the rule list. Most people never need it; it is there for the cases the two presets don't cover — a regional alias, a station you'd rather not repeat, or a second radio.

Rules are checked from the top. The first one that matches the next unused hop decides. Each one has:

Alias — the name in the path this answers to. WIDE, TRACE, a regional alias, or a callsign.
Match — WIDEn-N means the alias followed by a digit, like WIDE2-2; the hop counts down and your callsign goes in. Exact means that address and no other, replaced by your callsign.
Widest request — the largest ask this rule answers. 1 is WIDE1-1 alone; 2 adds WIDE2-1 and WIDE2-2. This one number is the entire difference between the fill-in and wide-area presets.
Then — repeat it, or leave it alone. A leave it alone rule placed above another is how you decline something a broader rule would otherwise catch.
Wait first — the viscous hold, per rule.

Packets addressed to your callsign are always repeated, and that never needs a rule. Being addressed by name is what your callsign means. If you genuinely want to decline it, an exact rule naming your callsign with leave it alone will do it, because a rule you wrote down beats one that was implied.

Rules are checked in the order they appear, and each card is numbered so you can see which one is first. Move up and Move down in an open rule change that order.

Only certain stations

Only these stations narrows the digipeater to an allow-list. A packet from a callsign that is not on the list is left alone whatever its path asked for — this is a different question from the rules above, which decide which hops get answered rather than which stations get repeated for.

One pattern per line:

N0CALL — that callsign with no SSID, and nothing else.
N0CALL-7 — exactly that station.
N0CALL-* — every SSID of one operator: their handheld, their mobile, their tracker.
N0CA* — every callsign starting N0CA, any SSID. Useful for "my club" or a callsign area.

Lines that can't be read are listed back to you rather than dropped quietly, because a station you believe is covered and isn't is the one failure this feature could have.

If you know the IGate's Stations roster, note that this list takes prefix wildcards and that one does not. The difference is deliberate: the IGate's roster decides whose positions get put on the air, so a broad pattern there could mean hundreds of strangers' beacons on a shared frequency. This list only ever makes the digipeater transmit less than it otherwise would, so a broad pattern is at worst a list that does nothing.

Turning the list on and leaving it empty means nothing can be repeated. The screen says so rather than leaving you with a digipeater that looks like it is running on a quiet channel.

Which radios

Every rule has Hear on and Repeat on, and both let you pick more than one radio. They are shown whether or not you have a second radio configured, because leaving them at "any" means the rule follows whichever radio happens to be switched on — so the same settings can repeat on a different transmitter depending on the day.

Hear on — leave it on Any radio and the rule answers packets from any of them. Name one or more and it answers only those, which is how you keep a receive-only TNC you use for logging out of it.

Repeat on — leave it on The same radio and the packet goes back out the way it came, which is what an ordinary digipeater does. Name one radio and it bridges: heard on one, repeated on another. Name several and the packet is transmitted on each of them — a cross-band repeat, and real airtime on every one of them. Each radio carries its own transmit budget, so a busy band using up its allowance cannot silence a quiet one.

Radios you have configured but switched off are still listed, marked (off). A rule pinned to a radio that is off stays pinned to it and simply does not fire until you turn that radio back on.

A viscous wait on a cross-band rule stands down per band. If another digipeater repeats the packet on one of the radios you named, only that transmission is dropped; the other band's stations have heard nothing, so that one still goes out.

A packet whose path is already full — eight digipeater addresses is the most a frame can carry — is left alone rather than repeated with the request quietly cut short. A path that long has been through more digipeaters than any plan allows and does not need one more.

In the packet log

A packet your digipeater repeated keeps its own row in the packet log and gains a DIGI mark in the left-hand gutter, under the channel tag. There is no second row — a digipeat is the same packet with a different path, not a new one.

The Repeated chip above the log narrows it to packets your digipeater handled. It appears only once there is something to filter.

Watching it work

The screen shows three running counts:

Repeated — packets you put back on the air.
Covered by others — packets you held that another digipeater repeated first, so yours stayed silent.
Holding — packets waiting out their delay right now.

Covered by others is the one to watch if you are running a fill-in. It is the only count that goes up when your digipeater decides not to transmit, and a healthy fill-in in a well-served area will show far more of these than repeats. That is the feature working, not failing.

Underneath is the last few packets it repeated. Packets it declined are not listed — a list of those is just the app reading its own settings back to you. Tap a row to open that packet in the packet log.

The counts and the list survive settings changes. They start over only when you turn the digipeater off and on.

With the screen off

The digipeater keeps running in the background on the same terms as everything else the app does on the air: Run in the background has to be on, and there has to be a radio channel up. See Background & battery. With that switch off, the digipeater stops when you leave the app and starts again when you come back.

One thing behaves differently in the background. Android freezes the app's own timers while it is not on screen, so the wait on a viscous rule is released by the background service's 20-second heartbeat rather than to the second. A five-second hold may go out up to twenty seconds late, which is still a digipeat. A hold that has aged more than thirty seconds past its wait — the phone was asleep in a pocket, say — is dropped rather than transmitted: by then every other station has long since made its own decision about that packet, and a repeat that late is a stale duplicate rather than a digipeat.

Being a good digipeater

Start as a fill-in. Change only if you know why.
Leave the viscous wait on. It is the difference between helping and adding duplicates.
Watch Covered by others for a while before deciding you are needed. If it is high and Repeated is low, the area already has coverage.
Your callsign is on everything it puts on the air, and you are responsible for that in exactly the same way you are for anything else you transmit. Unattended automatic transmission is regulated differently in different countries; check what applies where you are before switching it on.

Last updated 6 September 2026