What is that yellow circle on my map?
Somewhere around a half-hour or an hour after you start Xastir with a connected TNC, you will begin to see a yellow circle surrounding your station at some zoom levels. This is your “ALOHA Circle,” the circle containing approximately the number of stations that should saturate your local APRS channel. See ALOHA Circle Text for details. The short story is you should set your path so your packets don’t travel farther than this circle’s radius. This circle is shown when your station is in view and you are zoomed out far enough to contain the circle in the viewport. Its radius is recalculated once every half an hour from the stations you’ve heard on RF. Stations you hear from internet servers or other non-RF sources are not included in the calculation. The circle can be turned off from the Station->Filter Display menu but it will be enabled again each time you restart Xastir.
