Stations

The Stations tab is one list of every station and object you have heard, and each entry opens into a full station page.

The list

When your own position is known, the list sorts nearest first; otherwise newest first. The NEAREST / NEWEST button says which and switches between them, and the header carries the counts: "42 shown · 97 heard". Each row carries the station's symbol, distance, how long ago it was heard, and the station's comment. A station that sent no comment shows its status text, and one that sent neither shows the device behind it when it can be identified.

Filters and search

Chips narrow the list: ALL, STATIONS and OBJECTS. A separate ON FREQ chip keeps only stations advertising a voice frequency you can tune to. The search box ("Callsign, text, device, 146.52…") reaches across callsign, comment, status, frequency, and device model, so kenwood finds every TH-D75 heard, and 146.52 finds whoever is announcing the calling frequency.

Where you heard it: provenance badges

Every row and screen carries a provenance badge. It shows a radio-wave mark for heard over RF, a globe for via the internet (APRS-IS), or both marks together. Both is a first-class state, not a fallback: an RF contact proves a radio path works, an internet contact proves nothing about propagation, and the app never collapses the two.

The station page

Open a station and you get the decoded picture, not raw packet fields:

• Device: the hardware identified from its beacon, from the APRS device-ID database. Radios that identify themselves in Mic-E comment bytes are decoded and stripped rather than shown as trailing garbage in the comment.
• Path: how its packets reached you, or that you heard it direct, with no digipeaters.
• Via ISS: shown only when the space station's digipeater has repeated one of its packets, with how many and when the last one was. Tap it for the ISS screen.
• Position: coordinates with a reverse-geocoded place name; a sender using position ambiguity is shown with its digits honestly marked as withheld. For the same station as a Maidenhead locator, and the bearing in degrees, see Grid squares.
• Moving: course and speed, plus Altitude where reported.
• Mic-E status: the one-word status a Mic-E radio transmits (En Route, In Service…).
• First heard and Packets: how long you have known this station and how much you have from it, plus its recent packets, each linking into the packet log.

From the same page: Pin puts the station at the top of the list (see below), Find on map centres the map on the station, Message starts a conversation, and Export track as GPX or KML (an APRS Connect Pro feature) saves a track that goes anywhere for use in other mapping tools.

Pinned stations

Tap the star on a station's page to pin it. A pinned station sorts to the top of the Stations list, whichever order the list is in, and carries a filled star on its row. Tap the star again to unpin.

While you are connected to APRS-IS, a pinned station is also added to your server filter, so its packets reach you wherever it is. It does not have to be inside your range filter to keep moving on the map. This only applies over the internet: a radio hears what it hears.

The view filter (below) has a Show only row: choose PINNED and the map, the Stations list and the packet log show only your starred stations and their packets. It combines with the other rows, so "RF only, last hour, pinned" is a filter you can set. The same row's VIA ISS chip narrows to stations the International Space Station's digipeater has repeated; see APRS through the ISS.

A pin does not notify you when the station is heard, and does nothing in the background. If a pinned station has not been heard within the view filter's window, it is not in the list, because the pin changes where a station sorts, not whether it has been heard. For "tell me when a station is close enough to work", see Mobiles nearby.

Pins are kept on this phone only and stay with the station's callsign and SSID: pinning a station's mobile does not pin its home station. A pinned station is never removed for going unheard (see below), and the pin is already in place when it is next heard.

How long stations are kept

A station or object nothing has been heard from for as long as the packet log is kept is removed: 30 days by default, set under Settings → Packet log → Keep packets for (see Packet log). This happens when the app starts and about once an hour after that. If the station is heard again it comes straight back, but its page starts again from then: First heard and Packets count from that packet. Its trail is kept for as long as Keep trails for says, and is there again when it returns. A killed object goes a day after its kill report.

These are never removed that way, however long they go unheard:

• pinned stations
• any station you have a conversation with in Messages
• your own callsign and your other callsigns, every SSID of each
• objects you put on the air

Messages are never removed by this. The telemetry channel names a station has sent stay for as long as the station does, even when it last sent them longer ago than the window.

There is also a ceiling: past 20,000 heard stations or 5,000 objects, the ones heard least recently are removed first, even with the packet log set to ALL. It is there so that a flood of made-up callsigns cannot fill the device. An ordinary feed does not come near it.

Other SSIDs

A station page lists and links the same operator's other SSIDs, such as the mobile rig, the home station and the weather station.

Weather stations

A weather station's page gets inline history charts of every measure it actually reports, built from the packets on file. An implausible reading from a broken sensor is recorded as absent rather than allowed to rescale a week of real data.

Who holds this callsign

The station page can ask the on-air WHO-IS service who holds a callsign, and the answer is cached: revisit the station and it is already there, with its age shown, and one tap refreshes it over the air. For more, external lookups link out per station to qrz.com, aprs.fi, and aprs.to, shown only where they make sense: no QRZ link on an object or a weather-network ID, because there is no licence record to find.

One filter for everything

The shared view filter applies to the map, stations, and packets. Set it once and it holds everywhere, and it persists across restarts:

Filtering to RF ONLY plus the last hour shows which stations are reachable by radio right now, and the map shows exactly the same picture.

Related guides

• Map: the same stations on the map.
• Messaging: talk to a station you found here.
• Getting started: if nothing is in the list yet.

Last updated 23 September 2026