Showing posts with label APRS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label APRS. Show all posts

Sunday, October 30, 2011

APRS rig back in the car

More years ago than I care to remember I picked up a Kenwood D700 rig.  Since I have recently pulled the HF rig and D-Star rig out of the car, I decided to put the Kenwood rig in for a while.  Scrounging around I found a nice 5 hz GPS that has RS-232 (DB-9) output and made up an adapter cable from DB-9 to 2.5mm stereo plug to connect the GPS to the rig.  It all seems to be working and http://aprs.fi is reporting my spots.


One downside of the D700 is that while it is a dual band rig, once you turn on APRS you pretty much lose the 2 metre side of the rig for communications.  That's ok, since there are so many 23 cm repeaters in the area.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Playing around with APRS tonight

I picked up my old TNC2 packet controller and dusted it off today.  After finding an old Hayes modem cable I was able to wire this dude up to my laptop.  About a million years ago, I registered a version of UIView32 which is a nice little APRS mapping package.

Of course there were no maps of the Western Washington area available for the software, but there is a nice feature where you can drag/drop a map bitmap onto the software and then define the lat/lon details for either the upper/left, lower/right corners of the map or by clicking on two points on the map and defining the lat/lon for those points.  I took a screen shot of a google map and defined two points.  Not totally precise, but close enough for giggles.  Here is a peek of the map after it has had a little while to listen on 144.39 Mhz to the APRS traffic.


I have an old Alinco dual-band rig that I inherited from my dad (W7QJC) R.I.P. that I might press into service for packet radio playing around.  Gotta get the transmit portion working next.  Just need to set some jumpers to match the microphone wiring and plug it in.