What is APRS?

APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System.

It is commonly used by radio amateurs to send small packets of information over radio, such as:

• station positions
• short messages
• weather reports
• telemetry
• status beacons

Plain English: APRS is like tiny text messages and location updates sent over radio instead of the internet.

What does a packet look like?

An APRS packet is usually plain text once decoded:

M0ABC>APRS,WIDE1-1:Hello from the browser

That breaks down roughly as:

M0ABC        who sent it
APRS         destination/application identifier
WIDE1-1      path/digipeater instruction
Hello...     packet content

What does a softmodem do?

A traditional hardware modem converts data into audio tones and back again.

A softmodem does the same job in software:

APRS packet -> audio tones -> radio -> audio tones -> APRS packet

This project runs that modem logic in the browser using WebAssembly.