The Great Car Run Packet Caper
Every August antique car enthusiasts hold a 90 mile run for cars made before 1920 that goes from New London, MN to New Brighton, MN.
For many years the Willmar Ham radio club provided communications support by placing mobile hams with 2 meter transceivers amoungst the participants.
They used the 146.91 repeater which is a wide area coverage machine and put up a net control tent at the Buffalo, MN halfway stop.
Usually a crowd would gather around to hear the progress.
The old guard in our club reveled in this opportunity to show off their repeater and made no secret of it.?
One of the other factions in our club were the digital packet radio folks like myself who saw greater possibilities by merging radio and data.
One of the obvious uses combined the new GPS service many of us had with digital radio to allow us to track a GPS transmitter paired together.
The much re known APRS was in it's infancy then - the biggest snag was a lack of decent maps to plot on the computer screen.
The popular thing at the time was to attach a GPS to a laptop computer running the Delorme mapping program.
The present location would show as a green arrow on a very detailed map!
In doing some experiments, I discovered it was possible to send the data from a GPS to the computer via packet radio, cutting the cord, so to speak.
We ran experiments on quiet simplex frequencies to fine tune the process and stay below the "old guard's" radar.
In the summer of 1994 with the help of John K0CQW and Joe N0NCO, we put together the system.
John got us access to a tower near Lake Minne Belle where we installed a temporary packet repeater which filled in a coverage hole once we were out of the Spicer packet nodes range.
Joe set up his own tent in Buffalo with a 1000W Honda generator,? packet station, antenna and the biggest monitor I'd seen attached to his laptop computer that was running the Delorme mapping program.
I was the tracking car. It took a little convincing to allow me to join the pack, but once in, I just stayed a safe distance behind whoever was the leader.
I was mostly in the dark as to how it was working as my radio was tied up doing packet. When we stopped in Litchfield I was able to hear the good news that everything was working better than we'd hoped!
At Buffalo, word got out that Joe had a graphic display of the run going and the crowd gathered round to watch.
When we got to the Buffalo fairgrounds, our stopping point, I peeled off and drove over to the tent.
The folks watching the arrow thought the old car was outside, but, it was just me, grinning ear to ear in my Dodge Colt with the GPS antenna "boob" on the roof.
For a day, at least, we'd stole their fire.
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Mike N0QBH
N0QBH Mike Berg