开云体育

On Sunday 16 June 2024, I will be departing from entral Michigan on a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles.? I will have "Studio B" (my mobile hamshack and radio operations trailer) in tow.??

Once again, I will be doing side-by-side comparisons of classic HF AX.25 packet APRS and APRS-over-VARA-HF.? I will alternate beacons on AX.25 and VARA, each mode on a 10-minute cycle while enroute.? Both modes are originated from the same computer, interface, radio (Yaesu FT-891) and antennas (Quicksilver Radio ham sticks for 60 and 30m) in the car.?
??? Note that because this is being run as a full laptop-based APRS setup (not a dumb transmit-only tracker), I should be able to receive/send APRS messages on any of the three modes (VHF, HF packet, HF VARA).
??? Three instances of UIview will be running side-by-side from separate folders to generate the three modes.

For the first day out (Sunday 0-500 miles / 800 km), I will be operating on 60 meters "Channel 5" (5.403.5 USB).? Plans are for the first overnight in Des Moines IA.? For the rest of the trip (too far away from my home igate/webserver for 60M), I will be on the? usual 30 meters APRS frequency -- 10.147.600 USB with standard 1600/1800 Hz "KAM" tones on 300-baud AX.25 and standard VARA-HF tones.

I will be using WA8LMF (no SSID) for 2M and direct-to-Internet beaconing via cellular,?? WA8LMF-2 for the HF AX.25 mode,?? and WA8LMF-3 for the HF VARA beacons.? Thus you can distinguish the posits from the three modes on sites like findu.FI or my own personal APRS webservers at?

???

I also have a dedicated Road Trip Tracker up at my web site:

???

This tracker plots all three modes with their three different SSIDs. It plots only what is heard? off-the-air? on HF RF, as heard from my home QTH? (no Internet).near East Lansing MI.? (The two-meter WA8LMF [no SSID] is plotted from both off-the-air and the APRS-IS Internet feed.) ?? The road trip tracker plots posits on 3D-looking relief maps, so once I get to Denver and the beginning of the "real west" (the Rocky Mountains), the map display should be quite interesting.

The outbound trip will be on I-80 across Iowa and Nebraska, I-70 across Colorado and Utah, and I-15 Utah to L.A. ? The return trip about a week later will be along the lay of the old Route 66 (I-40 Barstow, CA - Arizona - New Mexico onward to the eastern US.?

As an added "side-show" to this trip, I will be running my "Mobile SSTV LiveCAM" from a second? HF rig in the car on 15 or 10 meters if the higher HF bands are open.? I have a web cam pointed out the front window that automatically grabs and beacons a live SSTV image every ten minutes. This gets especially interesting when I get west of Denver into the Colorado Rockies and the Utah red rocks desert.