Authors

Letter from John Tarbox (WA1KLI), the Foundation President

May 20, 2026

Dear APRS Enthusiast,

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider our project, the APRS Foundation’s

Comprehensive Strategic Plan.  I personally knew the inventor of APRS back in the day, Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), and I like to think that he would be proud of his creation and of what we, the APRS Foundation, are working on to keep it alive.

My team has labored for over a year on this plan.  It took long hours of deliberation, research, and late nights to come up with a strategy that would carry Bob’s vision forward as he intended: to have APRS owned and developed by the ham radio community.  We believe this plan embodies this very idea: APRS is so large now that it does need some organization, but that organization must come from the APRS hams themselves.

This plan represents our best effort to help the APRS community today and for many, many more tomorrows.  It will change and adapt, like everything in Amateur Radio, but this is where we begin, and that beginning represents a lot of effort yet to come.

If, after reading this plan, you are interested in helping make any of this happen, please use the Contact Us form to reach out! We can use all the help we can get!

Thanks for being part of this amazing hobby!

John Tarbox, WA1KLI
President
APRS Foundation

Summary

It is important to understand the "why" of any plan, which begins in the next section.

But if that’s not what you’re into, you can skip right to Strategic Initiatives. That’s the work the Foundation plans to accomplish in the next few years.

In short, we’re going to put effort into:

An APRS Promotion Committee

We want to tell the Amateur Radio world about APRS!  We want to do community outreach, connect APRS hams socially, and build and share as much practical, useful information as possible to help everybody out.  We’ll develop a deep knowledge-base digital presence that combines our own research with others’ hands-on experiences. And finally, we want to find a way to recognize those who excel in the APRS community!

Example Technology Stacks

There are so many ways to do APRS, and it can get pretty complicated fast. We’re working on and will continue to develop guides that show you how to build APRS stations while teaching you the tech along the way. Every guide is being thoroughly tested by Foundation volunteers before we publish them. We’ll start easy and cheap, and over the years, add more and more complexity and options so you can continue to grow and learn!

APRS Standards Committee

APRS has grown into an entire family of data protocols that have only become more complex over the years. The Foundation will champion an APRS Standards Committee, a volunteer, community-led organization, to consolidate the various ad hoc and experimental additions and changes to APRS into a single source of truth. There’s a whole process here, including involving anyone with an interest, that allows tested, compatible, and structured changes to how APRS on the data layer works, making it possible for APRS to update and grow with the changing times.

APRS Reference Implementation

With every good standard comes actual working code. The Foundation plans to write and maintain an open-source reference codebase that implements all the features in the APRS Standard. You can use the code to inspire your own implementations, learn how a feature works directly from the source, or even use the entire codebase as-is to build your own APRS device.

An Interoperability Lab

There are a lot of APRS systems in the world, and some, frankly, work better than others. The Foundation’s Interoperability Lab aims to produce standardized test suites that you can use to test your gear and make sure it is consistent with the Standard. We’ll also be assembling our own hardware lab to test equipment right off the shelf so everyone can know how well that thing that has “APRS” listed in its feature list works.

An APRS Protocol Advancement Committee

We don’t want APRS to stagnate, to become a frozen protocol that gets left behind as the world changes. So we’re going to be looking for the innovators, the good ideas, the potential enhancements to APRS that should make it into the Standard and then help as best we can to get that idea moving in the direction of universal adoption. It might be a long road to seeing your new feature in all APRS stations someday, but we’ll try to help to make the effort worth it.

That’s the plan, for now. Things will absolutely change as we learn more. Nothing is set in stone except our willingness to try. Today what you see here are the actions we want you, the APRS community, to judge us on. If we achieve these goals, well, we hope you see success. If we fail, we hope you help us out with the needed pivot to the right thing.

We just hope you’re there with us.

Introduction

Welcome to the APRS Foundation’s Comprehensive Strategic Plan.  This document details the Foundation’s long-term (more than 10 years) perspectives and goals on how it can best serve the APRS community today and tomorrow.  Strategic plans are living documents and can change as the Foundation and APRS changes over time.  What is presented here are our best ideas as to what the Foundation can provide to help keep APRS working and relevant.  Over time the goals in this document will become more refined and true.  We welcome you to be a part of that process by engaging with the Foundation on any of its strategic goal teams.   

Until the passing of Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), APRS’s direction and vision was held by one man, the inventor of APRS, Bob.  The Foundation recognizes that since Bob first published APRS in 1992, APRS has grown to become a world-spanning ecosystem.  This size and complexity go well beyond Bob and his initial vision: it is people from all parts of the globe coming together with different solutions and technologies to form a whole ecosystem of what APRS is today.  Because of the sheer size and complexity of APRS the Foundation believes cooperative teams are needed to maintain a unified strategic heading with APRS while managing the adoption of new technologies into the ecosystem.

This document does not linger on the detailed definition of APRS.  That is left to the technical aspects of the APRS Standard and APRS Reference Implementation.  What this document does do is establish the core principals the APRS Foundation believes must be present in APRS to be successful long-term.  Those strategic principals are then extended to activities and outcomes that support those principals.  You’ll find those later in this document.

If you’re interested in helping the APRS Foundation, please use the Contact Us form to reach out!

The APRS Foundation is always looking for people who are invested in APRS and want to see the best for it and the amateur radio community.

Strategic Plan Components

The APRS Foundation’s Strategic Plan encompasses the following:

• A definition of what APRS is and is not.
  • This definition is critical to understand what the Foundation will focus on in a world that widely uses the term “APRS”. While we believe APRS is specific, the term “APRS” has come to mean a wide variety of similar things that may often change. While some “APRS” things will naturally fall outside of our definition, we don’t assert that they aren’t APRS. The definition we use focuses the Foundation’s efforts solely on specific, achievable deliverables.
• A statement of purpose.
  • Following the passing of Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), the Foundation believes there is a need for a more formal effort to maintain the APRS community.
• Specific strategic goals.
  • We have identified a series of must-have strategic goals that we believe make APRS a success for Amateur Radio. These are the goals that all our actions live up to.
• A set of "within-the-next-few-years" deliverables to the community.
  • The Foundation has identified a set of tasks and an organizational infrastructure that will best serve the entire APRS community. The Foundation will assist in building these deliverables in accordance with our must-have strategic goals.

What is APRS?

There are many systems similar to APRS worldwide, including those that use the term “APRS” as a generic term to describe their capabilities. Because of the extremely wide range of systems that might be considered ‘APRS,’ the APRS Foundation found it necessary to define APRS to establish which subset of these systems the Foundation will focus its efforts on. The following definition outlines how the APRS Foundation distinguishes between Amateur Radio APRS and the wide variety of ‘APRS-like’ systems.

The Amateur Radio Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is a:

1. An Amateur Radio service system and activity
2. Peer-to-peer ad hoc digital mode over RF and internet transport and
3. Unconnected unidirectional packet data and
4. Standards for encapsulation for transport (AX.25, LoRa, D-PRS, TCP/IP, etc.)
5. Standards and protocols for payload data (position, weather, etc.) and
6. An ecosystem that plays well together. Additionally,
7. APRS is an open protocol that is not a proprietary standard,
8. Available for anyone to implement their own software and hardware,
9. Where everyone is encouraged to participate in the protocol's evolution.

• Amateur Radio Automatic Packet Reporting System

The APRS Foundation is wholly and completely focused on the Amateur Radio service.

While there are many APRS variants and implementations outside of Amateur Radio (eg, APRS over ISM LoRa), these variants aren’t part of the Foundation’s goals. We believe APRS is for the hams, by the hams.

• Peer-to-peer ad hoc digital mode over RF and internet transport

APRS is an amateur radio digital mode that operates in both Radio-Frequency (RF) environments and on the internet. Data is exchanged peer-to-peer (without a central authority), often in an ad hoc fashion (packets are not routed or addressed to individual stations), between individual stations (every ham can bring their own station).

Peer-to-peer also implies that anyone willing can build on APRS to extend its capabilities at any time. Stations, Nodes, Digipeaters, IGates, and APRS-IS nodes are designed from the ground up to be approachable by anyone.

Unconnected unidirectional packet data

By design, APRS data is sent in an unconnected fashion, often by transmitting “in the blind” without a virtual circuit or link setup and teardown. Packets are also sent unidirectionally, meaning no specific station target is used; the intended recipient is anyone who can receive the transmission. Stations that receive an APRS packet can automatically decide on how to respond to individual packets, such as a digi, which may or may not retransmit the packet.

Standards for encapsulation for transport

APRS has standards for how a data packet is properly assembled and transmitted. There are fields used by APRS that are critical to the proper reception and propagation of an APRS packet. This also includes specific APRS functions, such as digipeating counts and device identifiers, that help APRS stations handle APRS traffic correctly.

Standards and protocols for payload data

APRS packets may contain any number of data elements, and APRS defines what those elements can be and how they are represented. This includes station symbols, location information, telemetry, weather, and more, including user-defined data. APRS defines each one so that everyone can parse data in the same way.

An ecosystem that plays well together

APRS has become a large ecosystem of various implementations of the APRS protocol. Because APRS developers build to the APRS standards, it ensures every station can participate in the whole that is APRS. This interoperability is critical, and the Foundation believes that the APRS community benefits greatly from a large number of different systems that speak a common protocol.

APRS is an open protocol that is not a proprietary standard

The APRS standards are open for anyone to use and not encumbered by intellectual property rights. Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), wanted, from the beginning, to ensure that APRS is not appropriated by commercial interests, and the Foundation follows in his footsteps by embracing the open nature of APRS.

Anyone can participate in APRS, including open access to the Foundation's standards and other work products that maintain those standards, without violating intellectual property rights.

Available for anyone to implement their own software and hardware

Because APRS is a set of open standards accessible to everyone, anyone can implement them in hardware and/or software as they see fit. As long as their implementation conforms to the standard, they can be assured that their packets can be heard and handled correctly by other APRS stations. As long as an implementation ‘talks’ proper APRS protocol, it will be accepted by all components of the APRS ecosystem.

Everyone is encouraged to participate in the evolution of the protocol

The Foundation believes that because APRS is an open protocol, APRS should be open to incorporating new ideas. Anyone in the APRS community can participate in the further development of the APRS protocols. The Foundation places no limit on who can and cannot be involved in helping to advance APRS. The Foundation and any institutions created or enhanced by the Foundation shall remain transparent and open to the entire community. Participation is encouraged.

Statement of Purpose

Why does APRS need the APRS Foundation?

Because of the nature of the APRS protocol defined above, it requires:

1. Protocol and transmission/reception standards
2. Interoperability among a wide variety of hardware and software
3. Openness to new participants, developers, hobbyists, and engineers
4. Approachability of the community so that APRS remains community property
5. Its Peer-to-peer nature requires diverse systems to work together

APRS benefits greatly by having a non-profit, unpaid volunteer organization that embodies these ideas and provides a strategic direction to ensure that APRS remains relevant, useful, and current. This direction will be maintained by members of the APRS community for the APRS community. To maintain APRS as a coherent system that remains functional, the APRS Foundation needs to engage with the APRS community to drive standards, foster forward progress, and promote APRS for all of us to be able to continue to enjoy APRS.

Strategic Goals for APRS

The APRS Foundation has identified the following goals as necessary to ensure the successful continuation and advancement of APRS. These are our core strategic goals:

1. Provide an institutional structure (protocol management, documentation, etc.) around APRS to ensure continuity of the APRS protocol over time.
   1. The Foundation believes that an institution (an organized group of volunteers) surrounding APRS is critical to providing structure and planning for APRS. Instead of the potential for many individual features competing for acceptance and thus creating a fractured, incompatible APRS ecosystem, a managed curation of standard enhancements ensures that APRS will work into the future for every implementation, from individual hams to radio hardware vendors.
2. Build a strong sense of community across the APRS world so participants feel connected and invested in APRS as a whole.
   1. The Foundation believes that the peer-to-peer nature of APRS embodies the best of ham radio operators working together.  As such, the Foundation believes that a strong sense of community around APRS provides hams with a welcoming environment to pursue their hobby to the level they desire.
3. Provide an open, inviting culture to the APRS community.
   1. APRS, by its protocol definition, allows participation by any ham, from entry-level to advanced, at any time.  The Foundation believes this technical design is worth replicating within the culture of APRS: a hobby that reduces barriers to participation, remains open to new hams and new ideas, and embraces the welcoming, organic nature of APRS.
4. Develop and support highly dedicated core people who provide leadership for APRS Foundation core activities.
   1. Like most pursuits, APRS requires a group of highly dedicated people that has deep knowledge of APRS to energetically represent APRS.  Until recently, this was Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), and a small number of individuals, but today APRS requires a team.   Highly dedicated people are found in all successful aspects of amateur radio, and the Foundation wants to follow this pattern to ensure APRS succeeds going forward.
5. Help curate and define low-cost entry ways to enter the APRS world that are within the technical reach of most amateur radio operators.
   1. APRS is welcoming to new hams, and the Foundation understands that many hams are cost-conscious to a new part of their hobby.  To address that, the Foundation will help identify low-cost, low-complexity ways to begin participating in APRS and encourage hams to participate.
6. Help APRS participants continue to achieve as they wish up a progression path of technology and responsibility within APRS.
   1. Like many things in amateur radio, APRS has a gradient of easy-to-challenging ways a ham can participate.  The Foundation wants to help hams understand common ways to continue advancing their practice, knowledge, and success with APRS.  With a well-defined set of ever-increasing technically challenging steps, hams have at least one path of many that they can engage with APRS.
7. APRS participation can be technically simple, utilizing easy to obtain, configure, and operate technology, to complex such as creating software and/or hardware systems, in service of the APRS community.
   1. The Foundation recognizes that the APRS ecosystem is vast and has a number of ways to engage with it.  The Foundation encourages everyone to participate to the level they feel comfortable with, and encourages and enables people to gain knowledge and capabilities by providing easy-to-access, easy-to-understand resources and guidance so they can implement and build their APRS involvement to their liking.
8. Encourage increased participation with certificates, awards, gamification, and other incentives.
   1. APRS, being an open community, should recognize its members’ outstanding achievements through traditional amateur radio-style mechanisms.   The Foundation will encourage, develop, and partner to bring such things as awards and recognition to the APRS world.  The Foundation believes extraordinary hams should be recognized for their efforts!
9. Foster a sense of personal challenge with APRS that results in a sense of accomplishment.
   1. Amateur Radio has a long-running tradition of personal achievement: operators build their own stations to get on the air.  When it works, they know it.  With their personal accomplishment from APRS in hand, hams will express their successes to others, hopefully inspiring more to achieve with APRS.  The Foundation wants to encourage that sense of personal accomplishment as the foundation of the culture of APRS.
10. Encourage APRS users to increase their technical knowledge and capabilities so they become more capable, agile, and self-sufficient in maintaining and upgrading their own equipment as well as helping others.
    1. Amateur radio is a highly technical domain with many intersecting disciplines.  The Foundation believes that the more capable an APRS operator is in working with the APRS technologies, the more the whole community benefits.  A ‘fix it’ culture is prominent in Amateur Radio, resulting in self-sufficiency even outside APRS and the radio hobby.  The Foundation believes this ‘can-do’ attitude is essential and beneficial to everyone.

Strategic Initiatives for 2026

The following strategic initiatives mark the Foundation’s start toward contributing to the APRS community. We believe these provide the best results for the effort to assist in the transition from Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), to a community-led effort. Each of these projects is expected to deliver value as soon as possible and to last as long as needed. Each of these is an initial estimate, and it is expected that everyone involved will learn and evolve the project over time while staying true to the Foundation’s Strategic Goals.

Every project rests on the Foundation’s strategic goals, and success will be measured by the positive impact on them. Each one will require substantial learning, and initial execution may contain important lessons. The Foundation will acknowledge those learning opportunities and improve execution over time.

The Foundation encourages members of the APRS community to participate in these projects: your input is valuable, your time even more so.

-1- APRS Promotion Committee

APRS has grown to become a worldwide phenomenon that thousands of hams participate in. While the original engineer, Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), was able to promote and encourage hams to be a part of APRS early on, the reach of a single person doesn’t meet the need to grow the APRS hobby. The Foundation recognizes that more must be done, and that a dedicated, coordinated effort is required to bring the global APRS community together. APRS is not just a technology; it is a community.

Strategic Goal

Because APRS is a peer-to-peer ad hoc digital mode, the Promotion Committee must work to increase the number of active APRS hams by:

a) Promoting and celebrating personal accomplishments
b) Encouraging and growing a fix-it culture
c) Providing a graduated path of upward technical complexity and responsibility within APRS
d) Providing an open, inviting culture to the APRS community
e) Developing and supporting a highly dedicated core group that provides leadership for APRS Foundation activities
f) Gamifying APRS with awards and certificates

The APRS Promotion Committee has tasked itself with fostering growth, engagement, and enthusiasm throughout the global APRS ecosystem. The committee will achieve this by making APRS more visible, accessible, and rewarding for amateur radio operators at all skill levels through the following key initiatives:

Community Outreach and Engagement

Since Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK)’s passing, there hasn’t been a concerted effort to represent APRS as a whole across the ham community. To change that, the Foundation intends to build a new APRS brand identity and follow that with quality online resources and engagement. If APRS is being discussed online, we want to help.

We also want to attend major ham events, such as Hamvention and Hamcation, and more to give talks on the state of APRS, potential plans for the future, teach hams about APRS technology, and hear your needs and desires for moving APRS forward.

Finally, we wish to attend local meetups informally to provide personal interaction for hams to participate in discussions about APRS. We might be there to help; we might be there to listen; we will be there to bring APRS people together.

Digital Presence and Resource Development

There’s a lot to the world of APRS, and the Foundation wants to try to bring together its own produced knowledge, along with copies, links, and blogs that connect to even better technical information, community news, and the vast amount of APRS-related homebrew know-how available on the web. When it comes to APRS, the Foundation wants to skip the algorithm and provide a human-curated library of useful information for hams of any skill level working on APRS.

Over time, the Foundation intends to collect the deep APRS questions that hams encounter into one place, providing a knowledge base with answers from actual hams who have solved the technical problem in real life.

We also think APRS events are a fantastic way to be a part of the hobby. We’ll work on a calendar so you can easily find cool APRS events to participate in.

And finally, we want APRS to be a community. We’ll try to connect with other APRS and ham radio organizations, be it clubs, special interest groups, developers, and companies, to share knowledge firsthand.

Individual Skill Advancement and Recognition of Achievements

The first steps into a new part of ham radio aren’t always easy. We’ll try to be there with guides to help everyone progress with APRS at all levels. We’re working on initial equipment guides that we’re testing in-house today. Our guides will be based on lessons learned by doing it ourselves first: if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t make it.

We also want to recognize the progress of hams participating in the APRS community. While there are a couple of ideas already in the field, we don’t know what that looks like yet. But stick with us, your hard work deserves to be shown off to the APRS world!

-2- Example Technology Stacks

APRS can be a complex project to undertake with numerous combinations of software, hardware, radios, and antennas. The Foundation considers it critical to demystify the entry point for new hams and to provide working examples of APRS technology that others can learn from, implement, or be inspired by, so they can get on the air with APRS in a way that’s useful to them. While not every possible use of APRS can be covered, the most common routes hams can build on should be shown. This should make getting into APRS, or even progressing with APRS, easier for everyone.

Strategic Goal

Because APRS is a peer-to-peer ad hoc digital mode (1), must be an ecology of APRS that plays well together (5), and is an open protocol (6) we must provide an established example technology stack (GPS, TNC, radio, etc) to demonstrate the simple to complex technology stack [6,7] as well as the desire to keep the cost of entry and complexity low [5], including using existing hardware.

The Foundation will initially focus on the highest-payback, lowest-cost examples to provide an easy on-ramp to APRS that most hams can achieve on a reasonable budget. Following that will be a series of tiered how-tos that deliver higher complexity stations for more advanced hams:

1. How to Make APRS Stations Work guides that explain individual station building
2. How to Make Digipeaters and IGates Work guides that explain building fixed infrastructure stations
3. Understanding APRS-IS for a deeper dive into the internet side of APRS

The Foundation understands that readers may want to be placed on a track with a clear starting point, foundational learning, considerations for their station, and accessible how-tos that help a ham build a station and understand the concepts behind it. Sources cited will be vetted by the Foundation’s technical experts. Guides will be tested in actual real-life conditions before being released. The Foundation wishes to build an APRS knowledge base that hams feel comfortable using as the first stop for getting started with APRS.

This project starts where many hams new to APRS would start: how to get into APRS easily and affordably. Given that integrating radios, TNCs, APRS stacks, computers, and phones can be intimidating, the APRS Foundation is actively researching and testing our example stacks under real-world conditions. There’s a lot to learn here, and a new ham’s journey with us will be one of education and accomplishment.

-3- APRS Standards Committee

With APRS growing into a global team effort, the APRS Foundation recognizes that there needs to be an open community-focused committee that maintains the APRS standards so everyone, including individual developers, hardware and radio manufacturers, APRS-focused companies, and APRS users, can rely upon a common set of standards. This is the APRS Standards Committee and aims to carry on from where Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), left off in defining and maintaining the technical definition of APRS.

Standards included are APRS RF, APRS-IS, symbol tables, TOCALLs, and cooperative standards such as D-PRS and APRS over Amateur Radio LoRa.

Strategic Goal

Because APRS is an unconnected data packet system (1) that has open standards for transport integration and payload data (3,4,6), a standards committee must be implemented by a highly motivated core group [4] that has an open, inviting culture [3], which helps promote interoperability among all implementations [1].

The APRS Standards Committee supports a process so anyone can bring their updates and changes to the APRS protocols forward for consideration by the community. Teams of volunteers, called Working Groups, address individual protocol proposals, called Drafts, through a set of evaluation, development, testing, and community input phases to ensure:

1. Compatibility with Amateur Radio APRS on RF
2. Compatible and non-breaking with legacy stations
3. The change addresses the APRS protocols directly
4. The change makes sense, has utility, and is necessary

The process starts with a Draft submitted to the Standards Committee. The Committee will ask for volunteers from the APRS community to serve on a Working Group to review the Draft and its revisions.

The Working Group will, when it believes the time is right, make recommendations to the Standards Committee about adoption as a standard.

Everything will be done in the open so the Amateur Radio community can see the process unfold. If the Draft is recommended for inclusion in the APRS Standard, there will be a public announcement of the Draft and an open comment period to allow everyone to weigh in.

The Committee’s process is based on the IETF RFC process, providing an excellent foundation for the community maintenance of APRS protocols.

The Committee will start with clarifications and corrections to the APRS 1.01 specification published by TAPR. Most of these clarifications and corrections were previously posted on Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK)’s website and should be codified into a proposal. At the same time, tables such as the symbol table will be extracted so they can be maintained separately from the specification, allowing faster acceptance of new symbol entries. A subcommittee will need to be established to oversee and maintain those tables. The same goes for TOCALLs.

After that, the Committee will begin addressing additions to the specification that have become de facto standards over the years, such as message numbering that includes ack information. Excluded from this are any deprecations or modifications that are contrary to the 1.01 specification.

Once these updates are completed and published, the Committee can then begin processing new Drafts from the community!

-4- APRS Reference Implementation

The Foundation recognizes that the APRS Standard does not exist in a vacuum and is best served by an example codebase that embodies it. This allows hams to use this Reference Implementation wholesale, in parts, or even be inspired by it to produce their own code that results in an APRS product that truthfully speaks enough of the standard to be interoperable with the APRS ecosystem. This codebase should be readable, accessible, and well-documented, and it should faithfully represent the standard (and no more), so that anyone with a coding background can understand it.

Strategic Goal

Because APRS implements a standards committee, it needs a reference implementation to promote interoperability among APRS devices to provide a sense of community and institutional structure around the technology.

We intend to produce a new, unencumbered codebase that the Foundation will open-source for any ham radio vendor or commercial builder to use.

We have several goals:

• Inspire more APRS implementations by significantly lowering the knowledge barrier to entry for hobbyist developers
• Provide a working and complete implementation for international hardware builders to easily and correctly implement APRS for their products, such as hand-held radios
• Assist the entire community in meeting the APRS protocol standards by giving concrete examples of every feature and component to reduce guessing
• Build the reference implementation in such a way that required standards can be easily separated from the individual recommended and elective standards, so developers can choose what portions of the optional standards they wish to use
• Write the reference implementation in a language that has maximum portability across architectures while maintaining highly readable documentation and understandability
• Implement only the APRS protocol portion of APRS: TNC and modem components are the purview of individual implementers
• Make the reference implementation open and available for community contributions
• Help the APRS Foundation’s Interoperability Lab by providing a ‘gold standard’ of the protocol component to test other implementations against

By providing the community this reference implementation, the Foundation hopes to spur a new renaissance of development and experimentation in APRS as well as help meet the goals of having every vendor’s APRS implementation be compatible, easier to maintain, and more bug free so that everyone can enjoy APRS with less hurdles.

-5- Interoperability Lab

With an APRS Standards Committee and an APRS Reference Implementation, the ability to validate stations, implementations, software, and hardware must be available to ensure developers can be confident they’re working well with the rest of the APRS world. The Foundation will support an APRS Interoperability Lab that takes on the wide-ranging tasks surrounding validating individual components of APRS. The Lab’s work is open to everyone, from the individual ham to the equipment manufacturer, and will help anyone ensure their project works well with the entire APRS ecosystem.

Strategic Goal

Because APRS has a standards committee and a reference implementation, APRS needs an interoperability committee and a lab to be interoperable across all APRS devices and platforms to enable a sense of community and institutional structure around the technology.

The Foundation’s Lab will work to accomplish:

• A set of standard test procedures used to evaluate a Station Under Test
• A recommended working endpoint Station for the Test Station to communicate with
• Tests for different tiers and feature sets to exercise the Required, Recommended, and Elective standards, as well as
• Our own Interoperability Lab with hardware, software, and components collected and tested over time, to be able to independently reproduce

The interoperability test suites will be divided by the APRS Standard (Required, Recommended, and Elective) and by common feature groups. Such groups might be Position Reporting, Messaging, Digipeating, IGate, and a basic Weather Station. Each tier will have published, standardized, stand-alone test procedures that accurately represent the group's features. Tests can include suggestions on how to use specific hardware. A station can implement multiple tiers and may require multiple tests to validate. Interoperability will be based on which tiers a station can successfully pass, not on the full set of features.

Different types of testing are expected, each representing a different use case:

1. A User wants to know if their setup works
2. A Vendor wants to know if their product works
3. A Testing Facility does its own tests and publishes results independently
4. Report results of our own tests on APRS systems & products

If you want to build your own testing facility, you can use our test suites and recommended equipment lists to do so. This would be invaluable to the community to have multiple independent sources of testing to provide everyone with the best ideas of what works everywhere!

-6- Protocol Advancement Committee

The APRS community has a lot of people with different capabilities: businesses produce for-profit APRS products, highly technical APRS contributors have been working with the APRS protocol for years, and home inventors, including those who are just getting started with their own journey with APRS.

The Foundation knows that all of these are important to the world of APRS, but they each have different needs when it comes to advancing APRS for everyone. That’s why the Foundation will create an APRS Protocol Advancement Committee to help all of them through the process of worldwide acceptance of their great new ideas.

Because APRS has a standards committee, it will need a protocol advancement committee that encourages innovation in APRS and feeds back into the standards committee. This will provide a sense of community and help maintain the install base, low cost of entry, and low complexity for all users.

We know that there’s a lot to APRS; a simple position beacon isn’t the same as an APRS-IS core network node. However, everything still needs to be compatible and work together to maintain our community. One could easily get lost in the far-reaching implications of implementing a new APRS feature.

That’s where the Protocol Advancement Committee comes in: a group of volunteers there to help a vendor, developer, or just a garage tinkerer turn their idea into something that works with the worldwide APRS network.

We plan to:

• Produce easy-to-understand documentation on integrating new ideas into APRS without breaking existing stations.
• Be available to answer questions from developers on how to solve their implementation problems
• Help developers avoid interoperability pitfalls
• Assist developers in bringing their standard enhancement Proposal to the Standards Committee process
• Capture and maintain a knowledge base of helpful protocol information for everyone
• Broker relationships with vendors and other developers on how to integrate successfully

We believe we can assemble a team to help you keep APRS flourishing for another 30 years!

Closing

The APRS Foundation’s directors firmly believe that this plan best serves the entire APRS community. The plan represents a great deal of work: the establishment of infrastructure and institutional capability that has not been present in APRS until now. The effort to establish these institutions will be monumental.

We believe that the results will be worth the effort. But these grand goals cannot succeed without your help. Please volunteer for the Foundation and contribute to the effort to keep APRS alive through these initiatives. Your help is critical to making these goals happen.

The Foundation needs people of all calibers: copywriters, web designers, technical writers, testers, experimenters, and people with ideas that contribute to these goals to come forward to help out.

Participate in APRS beyond your station's limits by joining the APRS Foundation teams.

Thank you, and 73!

Acknowledgements

The APRS Foundation wishes to thank the individuals involved in the lengthy process of creating this plan. It has taken many hours to develop a comprehensive vision for the future of APRS and how the Foundation can serve the APRS community as a whole. Without the hard work of the volunteers, this project would never have made it this far.

Some thank yous are in order:

• Thank you, Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK), for what you built and championed until your passing, making APRS what it is today.
• A special thank you to Jeff Hochberg, W4JEW, whose incredible vision as a co-founder brought APRS Foundation, Inc. into existence. Jeff spearheaded our initial efforts and championed our mission, which ultimately laid the groundwork for everything we have achieved thus far.
• Thank you to John Tarbox, WA1KLI, for being there with Jeff from the beginning of the Foundation and then later taking the role of the President.
• Thanks to Lynn Deffenbaugh, KJ4ERJ (SK), for his assistance in starting the APRS Foundation with Jeff and John.
• Thanks to Don Rolph, AB1PH, for his sharp engineer’s mindset and willingness to demand, even of himself, the proof and the details to ensure our plan would work.
• Thanks to John Langner, WB2OSZ, for his mastery of the AX.25 and APRS protocols to keep the group aligned with the RF, audio, and digital reality APRS lives in.
• Thanks to Ron Startzel, KB5LNC, for his tireless work representing the technical accuracy of our efforts.
• Thank you to Pete Loveall, AE5PL, for his unwillingness to compromise on the core technical values and implementation of APRS. Without Pete, the Foundation might have attempted to break APRS entirely. We get it: it’s not a network. 😁
• Thanks to Jason Rausch, K4APR, for his expertise as a small-business owner and developer of APRS products. His perspective as a manufacturer has been invaluable.
• Thanks to Lion Templin, K1LEO, for the professional guidance in thinking and working strategically with decades-long perspectives.

Fine Print

Trademarks

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Disclaimer

The information contained within this publication is intended for general informational purposes only. While we endeavor to keep the information up-to-date and correct, no representations or warranties are made regarding the completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability, or availability of the content of this publication. Any reliance you place on such information is therefore strictly at your own risk.

In no event will the author(s) be liable for any loss or damage, including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage, arising out of or in connection with the use of this publication.

Some examples used within may be fictitious; any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Changes are periodically made to this document; these changes will be incorporated in new editions as they become available. Strategic Plans are living documents and will change over time.

Always seek the most recent, currently in use APRS Foundation – Strategic Plan.

The terms “should,” “shall,” and “may” indicate the required adherence to the instructions provided. “Shall” indicates a required, non-optional, method of accomplishment. “Should” represents a preferred method of accomplishment. “May” indicates an optional method of accomplishment.