Configure Beacon

The beacon is what is transmitted in the background by YAAC to identify, locate, and describe your own station. It supports both fixed and mobile stations using either the regular position format (plain or compressed) or the compact Mic-E format. It also supports multiple beacon definitions to support different beacons through different ports (such as a HF TNC versus a VHF TNC port). This is not used for non-station objects and items; see the object editing functions. The beacon configuration panel looks like this:

The options to be set for your beacon are:

• Enabling or disabling transmission of your beacon. Check the box to have your beacon be transmitted through all open ports that allow transmission.
• Whether to transmit APRS position reports using the ASCII real-time cleartext position message format ("!", "=", "/" or "@" messages, APRS spec 1.01, section 8), the ASCII real-time compressed position message format (same prefixes, APRS spec 1.01, section 9), or the Mic-E binary format ("`" messages, APRS spec 1.01, section 10).
• For non-Mic-E APRS position reports, which of the four sub-flavors to use:
  • the YAAC default, without an explicit timestamp but indicating that YAAC is capable of sending and receiving text messages.
  • without an explicit timestamp, and claiming the station will not handle text messages (not actually true, but useful for certain applications such as the Duchifat-1 satellite or for unattended deployments).
  • with an explicit timestamp, and announcing the station supports messaging.
  • with an explicit timestamp, and announcing the station does not support messaging.
  Note that specifying that YAAC does not support messaging will not keep YAAC from acknowledging received messages, nor from responding to queries; in YAAC's case, it merely indicates that no human operator would be looking at the messages.
• Whether to use an attached GPS receiver for the position source, or use a fixed configured latitude/longitude.
• The fixed latitude, longitude, and (optional) altitude to use if the GPS receiver is not being used.
• Whether or not to append the GPS-reported speed and/or altitude to the beacon message.
• Whether or not to append weather station data to the beacon message. If both Report GPS and Report Weather are selected, the course and speed will be for the wind, not the station, but the altitude will still come from the GPS.
• The symbol to use to represent your station, and the overlay character to use for alternate-table symbols.
• The optional monitor frequency to be appended to the beacon message, with repeater offset direction and/or PL tone or digital code frequency, and whether narrowband FM is being used.
• The station status to be reported in Mic-E position reports. There are 15 possible statuses: "off duty", "en route", "in service", "returning", "committed", "special", "priority", 7 custom states, and the Emergency state. This has no effect if regular Position format is used; if you wish to send these status values in a clear-text position message, you must manually include the status name in the free-text comment, using all upper case surrounded by exclamation points (ex.: !EN ROUTE! ).
• Whether to append RF transmitter Power/Height/Gain (PHG) or omni-DF (direction finding) information to the beacon message, and what the power (or received signal strength for DF), height, gain, and directionality of the station antenna are. Note PHG is meaningless for Internet-only or RF receive-only stations, and will be automatically suppressed, regardless of the enabling choice. It is assumed that omni-DF information will be manually updated as needed for the direction-finding operation.
• Any free text that should be appended to the beacon message.
• Which digipeat paths should be used for the beacon message. Several standard choices are provided (including the path of no digipeat aliases at all), but other custom paths may be entered in the User-Defined Digipeat Path text field. If more than one path is selected, they will be used alternately by the proportional pathing algorithm (each lower path used half as often as the path before it).

None of these changes are activated until the Save Changes button is pushed.