Still active?

[Stephen D]

Is this project active? I'd like to submit 2 PRs and am wondering of they would be accepted.

• Migrate from libfap to the aprs-parser crate - mainly so that message packets are supported
• Allow sending packets. I'm thinking this would be done by having the callback function return a vec of packets, which would be sent(empty vec if there's nothing to send)

[Dave Lewis]

Yes it's still active. I've looked at aprs-parser in the past - I think that it fails with some packets as it expects them to be valid strings (and aprs packets aren't always valid strings). I've been wondering about switching the parser though; are those packets ones I really care about, and if so how hard it would be to fix that in aprs-parser?

As for sending packets - yes, would love to have this functionality. I think the callback approach should work while also being quite simple.

[Stephen D]

Interesting. What would an APRS packet look like that's not a valid string?

[Dave Lewis]

Getting late here in the UK so a proper investigation will have to wait, but I'm seeing errors a lot with packets containing "ø" (at least that's what aprsdirect thinks is in the packets at that point).

You can have a look yourself by modifying the example code to do this when a parsed packed is matched:

match String::from_utf8(packet.raw) {
    Ok(msg) => (),
    Err(err) => println!("Error converting APRS packet to UTF8: {}", err),
}

I was printing out parsed.source before this so I could look them up, but actually it's probably better to convert the raw packet to hex in order to find out what's in there (or just debug and inspect it).

[Dave Lewis]

Ok, looked a little bit more - first issue I found was 0xB0 (unicode degree symbol). So I think the problem I would have seen when I looked at using aprs-parser would be that I just converted the bytes to a string with ::from_utf8 and that won't always work. So, I think the problem is in simple-aprs which should make it easier to fix and switch to using aprs-parser.

Now I really am going to log off for the night.

[Stephen D]

I was able to find some packets with random bytes - in particular, message packets. At minimum I think aprs-parser will need to be updated to support non-string messages. This shouldn't be too difficult though.