APRS Connect

Map

Five things on this page need APRS Connect Pro: the Rest of the world layer, the NEXRAD radar layer, the digipeater coverage heat map, the Space station layer, and downloading, importing and drawing offline map regions. Regions already on the phone are kept but not drawn while Pro is off. The map itself, every other layer, and the tile cache that keeps what you have looked at do not.

The Map tab draws everything you hear on a vector basemap rendered on the device: stations, objects, and your own beacons. This page is the reference for what the map shows and the controls around it.

The header carries the same RF / IS connection indicator as Messages: a filled half is connected, an underlined half is still trying, and a plain one is off. It answers whether your radio and APRS-IS are up without leaving the map.

The offline tile cache

Every tile you look at is cached on the phone, so areas you have visited redraw with no connection at all. You set how big the cache can grow, up to 10 GB, under Settings → Map cache; the default keeps about a region's worth, and the oldest unviewed areas are dropped first when the limit is reached. The cache is free; only downloading and importing regions, on the separate Offline maps page, needs Pro.

The cache is browsing history, not a download: somewhere the map has never shown you is not available offline. For a whole area ahead of a trip, download a region instead.

The cache looks after itself. A poor connection can leave it holding a map index that will not read, and the symptom is a map that draws roads where you have been and nothing anywhere new. When that happens, the app notices the failures, refreshes the cache and reloads the map on its own. You do not have to clear it by hand.

Offline regions

Settings → Offline maps lists the regions on the phone and lets you fetch more. A stored region is the complete map of its area, down to the detail level shown beside it, and draws on its own with no signal at all. It does not use the tile cache. Each region shows its download size before you start, and its date afterwards, with an Update action when newer map data is available. A download that fails keeps nothing.

Add map file imports a map file you already have, such as one exported from another phone or one you built yourself. It is listed and drawn like any downloaded region.

Downloading, importing and drawing regions need APRS Connect Pro. Regions already on the phone are kept while Pro is off, but not drawn; they come back the moment Pro does.

Real APRS symbols

Stations, objects, and beacons are drawn with their real APRS symbols, including overlay characters, so a digipeater with an S overlay looks like one, not like a generic pin. Where markers overlap, tapping opens a picker listing everything at that spot instead of guessing which one you meant. Station labels appear at closer zooms to keep wide views readable, and a reset-north button appears only when the map is rotated.

Trails, and honest position history

The Trails layer shows where stations have been, following the same time window as the rest of the app. Tap any point on a trail for the exact time, position, and speed at that point, and for the packet behind it while that packet is still in the log.

Position history is kept for 7 days by default, separately from the packet log. Both windows are set on the Packet log settings screen, and clearing the packet log does not clear the trails.

Two cases where the map avoids implying more than it knows:

  • A station that has not moved says "hasn't moved · N reports" instead of drawing a GPS-jitter scribble around its parking spot.
  • A station transmitting with reduced precision (position ambiguity) is drawn with its uncertainty as a real box on the map, not as a falsely exact dot, and the size is named in words: "somewhere in the 1 mile box".

Layers

The LAYERS panel toggles what is drawn:

  • Rest of the world: stations heard anywhere on APRS-IS, from our server. On by default with APRS Connect Pro, and it uses data. See The rest of APRS-IS.
  • Trails: where stations have been.
  • Weather radar: live NEXRAD precipitation radar. US only, off by default, and labelled with what it costs in data.
  • Packet pulses: ring a marker the moment its packet lands.
  • Digi paths: how a selected station was repeated, and who heard it.
  • Live packet paths: animate each packet's route as it lands, through any digipeaters to the IGate or radio that heard it. Off until you switch it on. A route is drawn only when the stations on it have a known position, and only when it is long enough to see at the current zoom.
  • Digipeater coverage: a heat map of where signals have reached a digipeater. Needs APRS Connect Pro.
  • Space station: where the ISS is, the ground it is currently above the horizon of, and its next orbit, computed on the phone from its published orbit. Off by default, and needs APRS Connect Pro. See APRS through the ISS.

Stations and Objects switch the markers themselves off. That is what to reach for when you want to read the coverage layer on its own: the view filter narrows which stations are drawn and has no answer for "none of them". The markers come back the moment you switch them on again. Nothing is deleted and nothing stops being recorded.

The rest of APRS-IS

The map normally shows what your phone heard. With Pro, the Rest of the world layer adds every station our server hears on APRS-IS, anywhere in the world, so the map is full wherever you look, not only around you. It needs APRS Connect Pro and is on by default once you have it.

Zoomed out, a busy area shows as many stations as fit without their icons piling up, and every other station there as a small dot where it is. Dots are colored by what the station is: moving, weather, a digipeater or gateway, or anything else. Zoom in and the dots turn into their stations; from a regional view in, every station is drawn. Tap a dot to zoom in on it. A quiet area always shows every station, however far out you are, and your own station is always drawn. Weather hazards such as fires, tornadoes and floods are only ever thinned against each other, so a tornado is never lost among the dots of a city.

Where your phone heard a station too, you see one marker for it, from whichever report is newer.

Tap a marker for its details: an Overview, its Track when it has moved, Weather for a weather station (hourly summaries for the last seven days), and Raw, its last 20 packets as the server received them. Tap a raw packet to open it in the packet inspector. Everything on these tabs says it was heard by our server, not by your phone.

Data, and using it offline

The layer only asks the server for the part of the world on screen, only while the map is open, and only for areas it has not fetched in the last few minutes. Switch the layer off and it asks for nothing.

What it has fetched stays on the phone, so the stations are still there with no connection, including at zoom levels you have not looked at yet. The banner at the top then says Unable to connect to server and how old the saved copy is. Saved stations are dropped once their last report is a day old, and saved details after two days.

What it does not do

Stations from the server are never counted as heard by your phone. They are not added to your packet log or your trails, they never set off alerts, and your IGate never passes them to RF. The Stations tab lists them only behind the APRS-IS filter chip, which is off by default, and search shows them separately under ON APRS-IS.

Map theme

At the top of the same panel, MAP THEME sets what the basemap wears: Match app, Light or Dark. It starts on Match app, where the basemap follows Settings → Display → Appearance along with the rest of the app, as it always has.

The other two pin the map on its own. A light basemap under a dark app is the usual reason: dark cartography is harder to read outdoors, and it is a separate question from what the rest of the app looks like. Only the map changes. The panels, sheets and buttons over it stay with the app's own theme, and so do the labels and trails drawn on the map, which follow the ground they sit on so they stay readable either way.

Digipeater coverage

The coverage layer is a heat map of the places a transmitter provably reached a digipeater from. A COVERAGE panel appears under the layers while it is on, with two answers to "whose":

  • Only me: where you have been repeated. This is the one nobody else can answer for you: it is built from your own beacons coming back with a digipeater's mark on them.
  • Everyone: every station this app has heard, yours included.

There is a third view you reach from a marker rather than from the panel. Every station's card offers Coverage of …, which draws that one station's footprint: the places it has actually repeated somebody from. The map says whose coverage it has switched to for a few seconds, and the panel keeps its callsign in place of the two scopes for as long as it lasts. It turns the layer on if it was off, so you do not need to set the map up first.

Tapping the same button again undoes exactly what it did, and no more. If the button is what switched the layer on, it switches it back off; if you already had coverage on the map, it goes back to everyone and stays on. Either way the layers panel can also let it go.

Most stations have repeated nothing, and the button says so rather than hiding: it draws an empty map and tells you there is no coverage recorded for that callsign. That is a real answer. The app has no "is a digipeater" flag and would only be guessing from the callsign, and an answer is more use than a button that is missing for a reason you cannot see.

What a mark means, and what it does not

Marks join up where there is enough of them. Each one is drawn as a soft spot rather larger than the square it stands for, so several stations repeated from the same street corner blend into one covered patch, and the more evidence there is behind an area the stronger it reads. A lone report stays a lone dot, which is the honest picture of a single contact.

Every mark is a packet that carried a position and came back with a digipeater in its path. The position is where the transmitter was standing; the digipeat is the proof something on the air heard it. It does not matter whether that copy reached you over the air or through an IGate, because the digipeat happened either way and the path is what records it.

The same packet often reaches you more than once: direct, then from a digipeater a second later, then from another one further out. Every copy is read, not just the first. A packet counts once on the Only me and Everyone maps however many copies came. If two different digipeaters each heard the station, the packet counts toward both of their footprints.

A single digipeater's footprint is credited to the first repeater in the path, and only the first. A packet that went station → A → B shows that A could hear the station where it was standing, and that B could hear A; only the first of those says anything about where the station was, so B is not given coverage there. Where the first repeater did not substitute its own callsign, so a plain WIDE1-1* comes back, the digipeat still counts on the Only me and Everyone maps, but no station is named for it and it appears under nobody's footprint. Colour is how much evidence there is, on a scale that flattens off: one contact from a spot is already clearly visible, twenty is full strength, and a base station beaconing from the same driveway all year does not drown out a road driven once.

How precise a mark is

Coverage is collected on a grid of about 56 metres, and a mark is drawn at the average of the reports that made it, not at the middle of its grid square. So a run of position reports along a road draws a line of marks along that road, close enough to hunt a dead spot with. Zoomed right out, marks are grouped so the map stays readable, and a group sits at the average of everything inside it; zooming in splits a group into its parts rather than moving the marks around.

It is also worth being clear about whose position a mark is. A mark shows where the transmitting station was, never where the digipeater is. Looking at one digipeater's footprint, the heat is the ground it has heard stations from, which is spread around it rather than over the tower itself.

Blank map is not the same as no coverage. It means nothing was heard being repeated from there, usually because nobody transmitted from there while you were listening. A station can also be picked up direct by an igate with no digipeater involved, and that leaves no mark either. Read the layer as a record of contacts that happened, never as a boundary around where a radio would work.

Where the coverage comes from

It is recorded from ordinary listening on every install, whether subscribed or not, so switching Pro on shows the whole history since you installed the app, not an empty map. Nothing is transmitted to build it and nothing leaves the phone.

If you run the app's own digipeater, every packet it is the first to repeat is recorded under your callsign as well, from the position the sender gave. That is your digipeater's own footprint: the places it has heard stations from. The same packet coming back through an igate or another digipeater is not counted a second time.

Coverage is kept for two years by default, under Settings → Packet log → Keep coverage for. It is an aggregate of roughly one small row per square kilometre, so a long window costs very little. Your own coverage travels in the backup file; other stations' does not, because it fills in again on its own from live traffic.

Watching packets travel

Select a station and the map animates the path its packets actually took, hop by hop through the digipeaters that repeated them. It is not a straight line from A to B but the route the RF network really carried. With Packet pulses on, you also see each arrival as it happens: a marker rings when its packet lands. Together with the packet log, this is the fastest way to understand what your local digipeater network is doing.

Every route found in the station's last 30 packets is drawn, including the later copies of a packet that came through more digipeaters than the first one to arrive. A route that is only the start of a longer one is drawn once, as the longer one.

Each route ends at whoever heard the packet last: the IGate that put it on APRS-IS, or your own station for a packet your radio heard. That station wears a double ring, and a digipeater a single one. A packet that nobody repeated still gets a line, from the sender straight to the IGate that heard it. The line only goes to an IGate that heard the packet on a radio, never to a server that received it over the internet, and only to stations whose position is known.

While the station's card is collapsed it shows Longest route with a distance: the full length of the longest route on the map, from the sender through every digipeater to the station that heard it.

One report's own route

Tapping a point on a station's trail draws the route that packet took, starting from where the station was when it sent it, rather than the station's recent routes from where it is now.

Most reports have no route to draw, and the card says which of the reasons applies rather than leaving you with an empty map: nothing repeated it, the digipeater that did repeat it never put its own callsign in the path, that digipeater has never said where it is, or the Digi paths layer is simply switched off. Only the last of those is something to change.

Follow-me

The FOLLOW panel keeps the map centred on you. It can use either position source, GPS (where you are now) or Beacon (where you last transmitted), and the map says which one it is following. Follow-me only uses GPS while the map is actually open; it never runs location in the background on its own.

Finding a station

From any station page, Find on map centres the map on that station and opens its card. The card shows the decoded symbol, position, ambiguity, movement, device, altitude and Mic-E status, with a link to the raw packet.

Long-press: where is that, and what goes there

Long-press anywhere on the map and it tells you the point two ways: the coordinates and the Maidenhead locator, each with its own COPY button, since coordinates go into a mapping app or a log and a locator goes on the air.

The same sheet puts something there: Beacon from here creates a fixed-position beacon at that exact point, and Place an object creates an object beacon for something like an aid station, a meeting point or a net control, announced under your callsign.

Seeing only what came over the air

Set the shared view filter to RF and the map stops showing you positions that arrived over the internet. That is a stronger thing than it used to be: the filter used to pick which stations to draw, taking any station ever heard on RF, and still placed each one wherever its newest report put it, internet or not.

Now a station is drawn only if it has a position that actually came in over the air, its trail draws only those points, and a dashed line runs back from the symbol to where you last heard it. The symbol stays where the station is, so it never disagrees with the rest of the app; the hollow end of the line is the last thing your radio heard, and the length between them is how stale that is. The line carries the station's callsign and answers a tap like the symbol does.

A station with no RF position at all is not drawn, and neither is one whose positions predate the app recording how they arrived and whose packets have since been pruned, because the app will not claim RF for a position it cannot vouch for.

The same works the other way round with IS.

Showing one APRS OTA op

Open on the map from an APRS OTA op opens this map with only that op's host and chasers on it, zoomed to fit them. People whose beacon has not been heard are placed by the position aprsconnect.com heard or by their grid square, shown as a ring. A bar at the top names the op and says how many could not be placed. Tap Show everything to go back to your usual map. Your saved filters are not changed.

What the map shows is filtered

The map obeys the same shared view filter as the Stations tab and the packet log: age window, RF or internet origin, and station kind. Set it once and it applies everywhere. See Stations for the details.

Last updated 9 October 2026

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