Today I have the pleasure to attend a good demonstration on APRS and I learned a few things. First – APRS stands for Automatic Packet Reporting System. That was one of the FIRST things that I learned. I thought the P stood for “Position”. I also learned that my mistake is quite common. Many people believe that APRS is ONLY an automatic POSITION reporting system. Perhaps the word “reporting” leads one to believe that. When I hear the term “reporting”, I think of data flowing one-way from one source to another. With APRS you can exchange more than just data such as GPS coordinates.
Stan Piekarczyk, K9STN, put on the presentation for our ARES group this weekend. Stan did a nice job with the presentation. He had planned on another speaker attending. But when that person couldn’t make the presentation Stan did research and used his personal knowledge and made a nice presentation for us. ARES stands for Amateur Radio Emergency Service. We provide radio communications on request.
If you want to see something neat, go to Google and type K9STN-8 into the search box and hit enter. You will see that there is quite a few internet websites that use the broadcast APRS data from Stan’s unit. So what good is it all?
Plenty of ideas on the topic. If your loved one wants to know where you are – in a snow storm, on a trip, out fishing, gone shopping, etc.. Stan mentioned when we help out at races. One car in front and one car at the end. People can see the progress real time on the internet. To demonstrate this, Stan had another fellow take a drive while we were able to see the car move on the internet in near real time – updated about every 60 seconds or so. Pretty cool stuff! I also know that APRS is being encouraged for SkyWarn operations.
One neat part of the demonstration was that, since the meeting was held in the Grand Chute Fire Station, we got a guided tour of the fire station. That was nice of them to do…
I have a close friend that got a new Yaesu VX-8R HT and she just ordered the GPS unit for it. With that she should be able to APRS. Neat from a handheld. I believe the Kenwood D7 HT also can do that. For us mere mortals, we need to buy a relatively inexpensive circuit board in a box. Going to Google and entering in “ham radio aprs transmitter” will give you over 200,000 hits! That will give you some idea of the amount of information available on the topic. Do a search for “OpenTracker” for one good device. Do a search for “APRS tracker” will give you some other choices.
As with anything, do some research into what is possible. Text messaging, for example. Or hook it up to your weather station and have that transmitted. Gets the thought processes started. Figure out what you want the device to do. Then set a budget. Then go shopping and find one within the budget. Be CAREFUL about specifics like type of connection cables and such…
This blog is not here to tell you which specific device to buy, or even what to do with it. Rather, my objective is to stimulate some thought on another aspect of ham radio that can be pretty interesting. I also wanted to give you a few search strings that might get you started. I hope they help!
Stay radio active!
Jon Kreski, AB9NN
http://www.HamRadioResources.com
http://www.Twitter.com/AB9NN
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