Washington Digital Radio Enthusiasts

The Washington Digital Radio Enthusiasts Amateur Radio Club maintains APRS digipeaters and a bi-directional I-gate. This facility listens on the North American standard APRS frequency (144.390 Mhz) for 1200 baud packet radio digital data formatted for use with the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS)

The system includes a powerful digipeater placed high on a mountaintop overlooking the Spokane area, and another fill-in digipeater with a bi-directional I-gate that makes for a complete APRS system using no more than two hops. Other fill-in digipeaters, operated by other parties, may also repeat or gate beacons or messages in the local area.

Digipeated packets containing beacons and messages are reported to the Internet based global APRS-IS network so anyone in the world can see the information. Also, any packets from the global APRS-IS network, destined for stations nearby, will be transmitted by the WA7DRE APRS I-gate transceiver, and repeated by the WA7DRE-11 mountaintop digipeater. If the destination station cannot receive the packets directly, other nearby digipeaters may echo the packets to help ensure the packets are received.

A good place to find, and monitor, stations reporting to the APRS-IS network: http://aprs.fi/ or http://aprsdirect.com

To learn more about the entire APRS system: http://aprs.org/


The WA7DRE APRS Digipeater and I-gate system is composed of the following hardware and software:

WA7DRE-11 Digipeater:

WA7DRE Digipeater and bi-directional I-gate:


For more information about this Digipeater and I-gate system, or to report a problem, please contact:
Randy Wilkinson - W4LKS
email: w 4 l k s (at) h v a c w a r e . n e t
phone: 509-993-7739