APRS Connect

IGate

An IGate passes APRS traffic between a radio and the internet. APRS Connect can be one, using the radio you already have connected, for as long as you leave it running.

The IGate is part of APRS Connect Pro. It also needs a radio channel, which Pro covers as well — there is no way to gate anything without a radio.

It is a different job from the digipeater, 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.

The two directions

They are separate switches, and they do very different things.

Radio to APRS-IS takes what your radio hears and puts it on the internet. It costs no airtime at all: nothing is transmitted, and the only thing leaving your phone is data over your internet connection. This is the half that makes a quiet area visible on aprs.fi and in everyone else's app.

By default it gates everything your radio hears that didn't already come from the internet. Only heard directly narrows that to packets with no digipeater in the path: anything a digipeater repeated is left for a gate nearer that digipeater, which almost certainly heard it first. Leave it off on a hilltop where you're the only gate; turn it on sitting under a busy digipeater, where re-injecting its whole footprint from your phone would only add duplicates and claim coverage you don't have.

APRS-IS to radio is the half with a transmitter on the end of it. It takes messages arriving from the internet and puts them on the air, under your callsign, automatically. That is a real responsibility, and it is why the switch starts off.

You can run only the first. A receive-only gate is genuinely useful, and it does not break messaging the way it is sometimes said to — see One-way gates below.

The safe order is to turn on Radio to APRS-IS first and leave it there for a while. The gate is doing real work at that point — your local traffic is reaching the network — but nothing is being transmitted, so you can watch the Activity list fill up and see what it decides before any of it involves your transmitter.

What it will and will not transmit

Some of these rules are yours to set. Others are not, and cannot be changed by any combination of settings — they are what keeps a gate from being a nuisance on a shared channel.

Messages

A message from the internet is transmitted only when the station it is addressed to has been heard directly, on your radio, in the last 30 minutes.

Directly means with no digipeater in the path. A packet that reached you through a digipeater proves the digipeater can hear that station; it says nothing about whether your radio can. Transmitting on that basis means keying up for someone who will never hear you, which spends airtime other people need and delivers nothing.

Bulletins and announcements are never transmitted, at any setting.

Positions

Position reports are off by default. When you turn them on, they are transmitted only for the stations you list by callsign — and for nobody else.

This is deliberately narrow, and the reason is arithmetic. Every position gated onto a frequency is airtime nobody else on that frequency can use. A filter admitting three hundred stations is three hundred stations' beacons landing on one shared channel, which is the most complained-about thing an IGate can do.

For a group working an area with no coverage — a search team, an event net — it is exactly the right tool, and those groups are a known list of eight or twelve people. So you name them.

The list takes one callsign per line:

N0CALL-9
K4XYZ-7
W1ABC-*

W1ABC-* covers every SSID of that one operator — their handheld, their mobile, their tracker. That is the only wildcard accepted. K* and N0CA* are refused, because those name a class of strangers rather than a person, and the whole point of the list is that you meant everyone on it.

Lines that will not parse are shown back to you rather than dropped, so a station you think is covered always is.

Rules you cannot change

  • Anything marked RFONLY or NOGATE stays off the internet, in both directions. Those are the sending operator's own instruction about where their traffic may go.
  • Anything already carrying TCPIP or TCPXX has been on the internet already and is not put back.
  • General queries are never gated. One ?APRS? on the air asks everyone in earshot to answer; gated to the internet it asks the world.
  • A packet with your own callsign already in its path has been through you once, and is not transmitted again.
  • There is a cap on how much the gate may transmit per minute and per five minutes. A packet over the cap is dropped.
  • An identical packet is not transmitted twice inside a minute.

Your callsign

The gate runs as your station callsign, and there is nothing to set.

It works through the APRS-IS connection the app is already running rather than opening one of its own — so it has no separate identity, and needs no separate login. That connection has to be able to transmit: if your APRS-IS channel is set to receive-only, the screen says so, because a receive-only login can listen but not speak and nothing the gate passed would reach the network.

Transmit path

Empty by default, which means transmit direct — no digipeaters requested.

That is almost always right here. The stations it is allowed to transmit for are the ones it heard directly, so they are already inside your own radio's reach; asking for digipeater hops spends other people's repeaters covering ground that is already covered.

One-way gates

There is a long-running worry that a receive-only IGate breaks messaging — that it tells the network it can reach a station, and then replies vanish into it.

APRS-IS handles this itself, and APRS Connect does the honest thing automatically. Every packet gated to the internet carries a marker saying whether the gate that sent it can transmit back:

  • qAR — this gate can carry a reply to that station.
  • qAO — it cannot.

APRS Connect works this out per packet, not per setting. With transmit switched on it still says qAO for a station it only heard through a digipeater, because it genuinely could not reach them. The claim it makes is always one it can keep.

The server also sends a message to every connection that heard the addressee recently, not just one — so a receive-only gate does not take the message away from a transmit-capable gate nearby.

Moving while gating

Nothing stops you. Driving through a dead spot with the gate running is a legitimate and useful thing to do.

The 30-minute direct-hearing rule handles the movement on its own: once you drive away from a station you stop hearing them, and they age out of the list. The gate stops offering to reach people it can no longer reach, without you doing anything.

With more than one radio

Reach belongs to a radio, not to the station. A station heard on your 70 cm TNC can hear a reply on 70 cm; nothing about that says it can hear one on 2 m. So the gate remembers which radio heard each station, and a message is transmitted on the radio that heard the addressee — never merely on the one the gate is configured for.

With Radio left on Automatic, that is the whole rule: the reply goes out where the station was heard. If you pin a specific radio, the gate transmits there only when that radio is among the ones that heard the addressee; otherwise there is no evidence of reach on the radio you chose, and it does not transmit. A station heard only on a receive-only TNC is one the gate cannot answer at all, and it says qAO rather than qAR for them on APRS-IS for exactly that reason.

In the packet log

Everything the gate does shows up in the packet log.

A packet you heard and passed to APRS-IS keeps its own row and gains a →IS mark in the left-hand gutter, under the channel tag. A packet gated the other way — one your radio transmitted for somebody else — gets a row of its own, marked →RF, because your transmitter keyed and the log records what was on the air.

Gated-down traffic deliberately does not move anyone on the map. The frame carries the original station's position, but you relayed it rather than heard it, and where somebody is should not be a claim sourced from your own transmitter.

The Gated chip above the log narrows it to packets the gate handled, in either direction. It appears only once there is something to filter. Packets your digipeater repeated are not gated traffic and have their own Repeated chip.

Watching it work

The screen shows three running counts — to APRS-IS, to radio, and how many stations are currently inside the heard window — plus the last few packets it passed, in each direction. Packets it declined are not listed. Tap a row to open that packet in the packet log.

The counts and the list persist across settings changes. They start over only when you turn the gate off and on again.

They are worth glancing at. A gate that has quietly stopped doing anything looks exactly like a gate that is running on a quiet channel, and the counts are the difference. See Background & battery for keeping it running with the screen off.

Being a good gate

  • Leave positions off unless you have a specific group who needs them.
  • Run it to APRS-IS only for a while before switching on the transmit half.
  • 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 the transmit half on.

Last updated 5 September 2026

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