There has been considerable discussion of the relative merits of APRS-over-VARA on 30 meters vs 40 meters recently on several mailing lists.
On February 8th, I will be traveling from my home QTH in central Michigan (Meridian Twp east of East Lansing) to Traverse City, MI for the annual Cherryland Amateur Radio Club? Swap-N-Shop. This is about a two-hundred mile (360 Km) drive.
I plan to conduct a test of 30M vs 40M APRS-over-VARA on this trip. I have TWO HF rigs in the car with separate antennas. One is a Yaesu FT-891 with a mono-band hamstick on a fender split-ball mount, dedicated full-time to 30M HF APRS. The other is a Yaesu FT-857 with an ATAS-120A screwdriver antenna? hard-mounted to the trunk lid is used for general operating on bands other than 30M -- usually for my "Mobile SSTV LiveCAM" on 15 or 10 meters.
For this trip, I will put the 857 and ATAS-120 on 40 meters APRS.? I will run two instances of UIview, two instances of the VARA-HF modem, and two interfaces on the mobile laptop, one for 30 meters and one for 40 meters side-by-side. The Panasonic Toughbook CF-53 quad-core computer with 16GB RAM has no trouble running all this,? along with a third instance of UIview for two-meter packet APRS on my Kenwood TM-D700.
The departure to the ham fest will be in darkness around 3:00 AM local (Eastern) time, so as to arrive at the venue by 7:30 AM (around sunrise) in time to setup.? The return trip will be in full daylight, problably starting around 1:30 PM local.
As in previous packet vs VARA tests, I will be using different SSIDs for the 30 and 40 meter beacons -- WA8LMF-2 for 30 meters and WA8LMF-3 for 40 meters so one will able to generate different tracks on APRS-fi for the two bands. WA8LMF (no SSID) is always my two-meters FM + internet beacons.
This trip will probably be in the skip zone for my own igate in central MI (once I get out of town) on 30 meters, and probably also on 40. I will be depending on other's igates on both bands to reach the Internet on HF.
Any thoughts about this before I set out next month??
I'm already planning to do this also on next summer's annual road trip to Evergreen Colorado for the Evergreen Jazz Festival always the last weekend? of July. This will involve full-summer long-days HF propagation on both bands.
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Stephen H. Smith wa8lmf (at) aol.com
Skype:??????? WA8LMF
EchoLink:? Node #? 14400? [Think bottom of the 2-meter band]
Home Page:
New? 30 Meter?? APRS-over VARA? Frequency
As of 1 Jan 2025.?? Details Here:
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