Presence & On Air
Presence
Send Presence is meant to announce “I’m on the air and around here,” along with an optional mood emoji and status text. It is transmitted as a status message, using grid location to provide the necessary position ambiguity.
Generic APRS tracker-style location beacons are intentionally not exposed. See location sharing for how to share your current position or a labeled pin within the context of a conversation.
Clear after
Optional status text is meant to be temporary. In the presence strip above your inbox, Clear after controls when your emoji and status line are removed automatically so you do not stay listed with stale information.
Choose how long the status stays live: 30 min, 1 hr, 2 hrs, 4 hrs, Today (clears at the end of your local day), or Never. The default is 1 hr. When the timer runs out, the app clears your emoji and text and sends an updated status so others see that the note has ended. Your presence can continue; only the extra message goes away.
Updating your emoji or status text starts the timer again from your chosen Clear after setting.
This works well for activities with a natural end. If you are activating a park for POTA, you might set your status to the park reference and choose 4 hrs or Today so nearby operators know you are on the air for the activation, without still appearing at that park the next day.
On Air
On Air is the counterpart to Presence. When stations transmit status messages, they appear in the On Air tab. It will also show stations detected through other traffic.
To keep the list useful, On Air is heavily filtered to show only stations that appear to be messaging-capable. For APRS, this uses a combination of heuristics (for example, filtering known infrastructure SSIDs like -13 weather stations) and TOCALL capability lookups.
The goal is to help you discover people you can message, rather than present a noisy list of infrastructure and automated traffic.
The filtering may not be perfect. If you expect a real human-operated station to appear and it does not, please share the details in the community forum.