M0MNF APRS iGate
11 Mar 2026 · APRS, RTL-SDR v3, Raspberry Pi5
APRS iGate
I've always had something of a thing for APRS. I'm nosey, it gives a view of what's happening on the air locally, stations moving about, trackers popping up on one of the motorways, the (very) occasional balloon based experiment drifting by. Rather than relying on other people's infrastructure, I decided to put up a small receive station at home.M0MNF-10 is a simple iGate listening on 144.800MHz. It's got one job and one job only: hear RF packets and forward them on to the internet APRS network so they pop up on sites like aprs.fi.
The station uses an RLT-SDR v3 SDR and decodes in software. Back in the day you needed a dedicated packet setup, now there's a Pi sat on my desk and it's working.
Hardware
- Receiver: RTL-SDR USB dongle
- Host: Raspberry Pi 5
- Antenna: Diamond X-50 vertical
- Feedline: Short run of RG-58
- Height: ~35 m ASL with antenna ~10 m above ground
Software
- Direwolf acts as the TNC, decoding 1200-baud AFSK APRS packets
- Packets heard on RF are forwarded to APRS-IS via the European server cluster.
Integration
It runs locally, so it was nice and easy to hook the iGate into my website.A small script periodically analyses the packets heard and publishes a JSON summary which powers the APRS tile you can see down below. The tile shows:
- how many packets were heard today
- which stations it's heard
- the furthest station received
- activity by hour
What the station does
The station is an iGate only.It listens on RF & forwards packets to the internet APRS network. It doesn't currently transmit or digipeat packets back onto RF.
APRS Dashboard
The dashboard updates every 5 minutes. As you'll see APRS is pretty quiet by me, but as with everything else on here, it's just for me.APRS
M0MNF-10 iGate
Updated 20:16
Packets today
31
Stations heard
4
Longest heard today
G7LFC-9
23.8 km
Longest ever
GW3ATZ-3
50.0 km
Top heard
M7JVH-1
23
G1AAK-1
5
G7GFU-7
2
G7LFC-9
1
APRS Coverage
Coverage · last 7 days · best point per station