APRS

[DaveK]

I spoke with Ollie, and Tom today. We will try and coordinate getting him hooked up Saturday.

Hector:


let me know when you have it up. I will be headed to San Gabriel tomorrow with the APRS running.

[hmfigueroa]

I don't really know when we will do that. Tom was going to call when he figured out his schedule for the day.

I will have it on in the House.

[DaveK]

As a final planning and set up opportunity, we will have one last get together before the trip. We still have two members of our group with a few bugs to work out of their aprs setups. Because of the need to the need to make sure that we have enough time to get everything working, we are thinking that having the meeting on Saturday 4/18/09 will work best. Depending on schedules, we could also do it on a weekday. Since nothing is set yet, speak up about preferences.

[sdnative]

I discovered a bit of a quirk in the way that my Yaesu 8800 functions while using APRS. The 8800 is a dual band transceiver and has the ability to do packet. It has a data port on the rear panel of the radio which serves to communicate with the necessary other hardware, including the computer. So far, so good.

As a dual band transceiver, it is capable of vhf/uhf, vhf/vhf, etc. Selecting either the right or the left band makes that band the "main" band and the one on which you can transmit. Both bands are still in the receive mode regardless of which band is "main". Still good.

The 8800 has a setting that allows a selection of which band on which the unit will receive APRS data, either left, right or main. Transmission of packet however, is fixed on the main band. So this means that in order to use this radio for APRS on one side and voice communications on the other, I must manually switch back and forth between voice communication and APRS transmission. Keeping the voice communications side as the "main" band during long conversations or forgetting that I have it set that way means that my position data will not be sent to the other units. In fact, what will happen is there will be periodic packet bursts on the voice communications frequency as this will have been selected as the main band.

Other than learning to live with it, any thoughts?

In researching an APRS setup, I found this, in the Yaesu manual:




Is the APRS transmission successful if it transmits while you are talking? Does the other party just hear a short data burst or does it completely wipe out the transmission?

[hmfigueroa]

The issue with that is that while you are talking, say on a repeater with the aprs function enabled, It will send the packet "braaap" out over the repeater, and it will not be decoded on the APRS frequency where there is a computer or digi listening to process the data.

If you have been following the net recordings recently, you have heard the posits from Dave's station transmiting over the top of him while he was talking on the net. Nothing technically wrong with that, but it could get annoying in the long term, and would generally be considered poor form.

It is truly disappointing that Yaesu implemented it that way. Especially on a dual band radio with dual receievers. Kenwoods handle that just fine.

[hmfigueroa]

As a final planning and set up opportunity, we will have one last get together before the trip. We still have two members of our group with a few bugs to work out of their aprs setups. Because of the need to the need to make sure that we have enough time to get everything working, we are thinking that having the meeting on Saturday 4/18/09 will work best. Depending on schedules, we could also do it on a weekday. Since nothing is set yet, speak up about preferences.

Sorry, I have been out of town. So I will need to catch up on all my email stuff and postings, I have a boatload of stuff to do at work, I can probably work something out Friday afternoon, but I would need to be home before 5 PM. If not saturday would work out.

[DaveK]

The issue with that is that while you are talking, say on a repeater with the aprs function enabled, It will send the packet "braaap" out over the repeater, and it will not be decoded on the APRS frequency where there is a computer or digi listening to process the data.

If you have been following the net recordings recently, you have heard the posits from Dave's station transmiting over the top of him while he was talking on the net. Nothing technically wrong with that, but it could get annoying in the long term, and would generally be considered poor form.

It is truly disappointing that Yaesu implemented it that way. Especially on a dual band radio with dual receievers. Kenwoods handle that just fine.

RATS!!! Sorry about that. I thought it was turned off. How long did it last?

You know, it's so easy to forget to return to the aprs band, that this is inevitably going to happen again. I sure wish there was some way to hack into the radio to fix this annoying feature. I am starting to see a 710 in the future.

How much do you suppose a used 8800 will go for these days?

[DaveK]

I have created level 5 map maps for all of the trails that we will be taking using NG Topo! maps and have calibrated each. Because of the detail on level 5 maps, I was not able to make just one map. I think that it had something to with the size of the actual maps, which ranged in size from 45-128 MB.

I will transfer this to anyone who would like to use it but I think that e-mailing it is not an option as the size of the files would exceed the limits of my e-mail server. Hector, any thoughts.

Having to deal with several maps is not a problem with AGW tracker, as I can open up any number of maps at one time. As soon as I leave one map, one click and I can move to the next map. I don't know if ui-view can do this or use some sort of map overlay process. Hector?

[hmfigueroa]

AGWtracker allows you to overlay your maps, you can load your largest map first then open detail maps and it will allow for more detail and the large overview at the same time.

As far as the large file issue, you can try something like skydrive that will allow you to send large files. skydrive.live.com

Hector

[DaveK]

Hector:

I did notice some references in AGW to what they call "layering" but, AS ALWAYS, there are no instructions or explanations. I am assuming that "layering" is the same as "overlay"???

I checked out Skydrive and they state that there is a 50MB limit on uploaded files. If true, this would eliminate most of the 7 files I have created, the average size being about 60-70MB.