APRSstat

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APRSstat monitors network traffic by connecting to an APRS telnet server and collecting network traffic statistics. The program is intended to run continuously as a background task on a UNIX/Linux system. It collects and saves network data for periods as long as a year. The data gathered by APRSstat is plotted using the companion program APRSgraph, which creates graphs as GIF images allowing them to be integrated into a web page. APRSgraph is executed as a cron job every five minutes providing near real time updates of network usage for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly periods. Characters per minute is used to measure network traffic. A detailed example of the San Diego, California APRS network is included which is displayed on the author's home web page. A cursory explanation of the software is also included in the paper. APRSstat and APRSgraph were written in perl and use perl modules GD and Chart for creating the graph GIF images. The original paper in Adobe pdf format describing APRSstat was published in the 17th ARRL and TAPR Digital Communication Conference Proceedings, September 1998.