Since Google released the Google Maps API today, I took the liberty of hacking together a quick Amateur Radio Automatic Packet Reporting System ( APRS ) viewer for Google Maps. The first go at this took about 20 lines of code, but I plan to continue working on it and hopefully turn it into something useful. Reading the full api documentation, there is a lot of functionality that can be had in Google Maps.

The link to the Google Maps APRS page is http://gAPRS.net.

For those of you outside the Ham Radio loop, APRS is a system by which Amateur Radio Operators can transmit their position, as well as any number of other bits of information, over the airwaves for others to receive and decode. Popular sites which achieves much more functionality than my little hack are findu.com and APRSWorld.Net, both of which use free US Census Bureau Tiger maps.

Special thanks to Jim, KB0THN, for access to the APRSWorld.Net APRS database.