APRSDroid on Android Headunit

[ChadHahn]

I watched a few videos yesterday about hooking the Kenwood TM-D710GA up to a phone to plot the APRS beacons from the radio. So I decided to try and do it with my Atoto A6 headunit.


I didn't want to pull the unit out of the dash until I got it figured out so I plugged my FTDI USB CAT Programming Cable from Blue Max into the USB port on the front of the unit. The other end I plugged into the Com port on the back of the control head. Eventually, I'm going to run the cable from the control head behind the dash into the USB port on the back of the Atoto.


I already had APRSDroid on the Atoto and I had to uninstall it so I could install the APRSDroid version that allows for OSM maps. After I uninstalled the online version of APRSDroid, I opened a browser on the head unit and downloaded the offline version from the APRSDroid webpage and it installed with no problem. There is a fairly old offline map of the United States that I also downloaded from the APRSDroid website. The information said I was to rename it aprsdroid.map and store it on the SD card. The app wasn't able to read the map from there so I moved it to the main memory and had no problem with the app seeing the map. This is the link for the OSM app and the map: https://aprsdroid.org/osm/


I then watched this video for the settings of the radio and the app.


After I got everything hooked up I drove around and was able to see my path on the map. There weren't that many beacons but I was able to see one other vehicle transmitting.


I don't know if this would be helpful for other APRS users but it's something I've been sort of thinking about doing for a while and was kind of surprised how easy it was to do.

 

[DaveInDenver]

FWIW, you don't have to use the old OSM version (which still points to one from 2018) anymore. As of at least v1.6 of APRSdroid that functionality has been brought into the regular releases. If you look under the little eye icon where you select maps there's an option for OpenStreetMap.org.

If you select that the app will pick up the local Mapsforge (.map) one just like the old offline one or download tiles from OSM if not. I also just point to a named map file in a generic location in storage rather than the "android.map" at default location.

 

[ChadHahn]

Thanks for that information. I tried using the APRSDroid that was already on my unit but it wasn't finding the map. That could have been because the map wasn't where it was supposed to be. Since I moved the map, I should try again.

 

[DaveInDenver]

APRSdroid can be finicky. I only mention it because there may be other bug fixes or improvements in the current version that might be needed on various Android devices like a head unit. For example, that original forked OSM version I believe is based on a version that won't run on Android 10 I think but I seem to remember a flurry of activity to get the actively developed Play version to run on it.