This site is devoted to the development of a new tactical communications messaging protocol inspired by Bob Bruninga's APRS^TM protocol.

OpenTRAC stands for Open Tactical Reporting and Communications. In short, it's a message protocol designed for carrying tactical information, including GPS position reports, weather data, and telemetry, over an unreliable, bandwidth-constrained network. Typically, this is the Amateur 2-meter VHF band using 1200 bps AFSK. The protocol is specifically designed, however, for use across multiple networks to support Internet backbones, satellite links, and so on. For more detailed information, check out the introduction to OpenTRAC.

Latest News

• 01-11-04: OpenTracker project has been moved to its own page. News entries relating to the project have been removed since it's not really directly part of the protocol development effort.
• 6-12-03: Experimental support for OpenTRAC in Xastir is currently being tested.
• 6-2-03: Alex, KR1ST, has released tracgen, an OpenTRAC KISS frame generator that converts APRS packets for testing purposes.
• 5-9-03: The list has been rehosted at sourceforge.
• 4-27-03: The server running the spec mailing list has suffered a hard drive failure. The list will be offline until I can recover the data.
integrated modem yet, so it still needs an external TNC. Not pretty, but functional.
• 4-14-03: First draft of the symbol set is up.
• 4-14-03: Remembered I had a 'latest news' page. The OpenTRAC dump program has been submitted for inclusion in the ax25-apps package under the Modified BSD license. It currently supports all ratified draft elements, plus the 0x500 series elements.
• 2-24-03: Added aircraft registration element. Working on getting an AX.25 PID allocated.

OpenTRAC is an open, free (as in speech) specification, unencumbered by licensing or trademark issues. If you'd like to contribute to the project, contact me at the address below.

scott@opentrac.org