Although the technical hurdles in establishing an APRS gateway in the North Lake District have more or less been overcome, the final stumbling block has proved to be licensing issues. A comment received in a forum a few days ago prompted me eventually to research the matter. It seems that in order to permit unattended operation of an Internet connected station I would have to apply for a Notice of Variation to obtain a GB7 call. To be granted this I would have to specify a minimum of three licensed operators who would be able to access and close down the station within 30 minutes.
I don't know even one licensed operator who could fulfil that requirement for me! It isn't entirely true that, like Tony Hancock in the famous sketch, I have friends all over the world but none in this country. But there is no other radio amateur in the town where I live at all! There is one who lives in a village a few miles away that I have encountered on the air a couple of times, but that's all. Besides which, giving the keys to the house to three or more strangers is not something I or my wife would wish to entertain. So the North Lakes IGate is dead in the water as an idea. A receive-only gateway presumably wouldn't be a problem. But without the ability to support two-way text messaging the whole project loses its appeal.
What is really needed in an area like this is a gateway on a mountain-top site covering a wide area, managed by a repeater group with the resources to meet the licensing requirements. But there does not seem to be enough interest in APRS for this to happen.
A new 2m voice repeater has recently opened across the water in Scotland, GB3LA, which is a strong signal here. This supplements the two other 2m repeaters accessible from here, GB3AS and GB3DG. Neither of those were heavily used. In fact you can leave a receiver scanning for hours and hear nothing except the occasional periodic identification. So why we needed yet another 2m voice repeater I have no idea.
If it had been an APRS gateway instead then it could have provided coverage over a wide, sparsely populated area popular with hikers for whom APRS could be a useful, not to mention safety-enhancing service.
3 comments:
Julian,
I guess you could solve this by mounting a GSM relay to shut down the Gateway in case of problems. You could give the phone number and instructions to 3 licenced amateurs.
http://www.pantek.fr/telecharge%5CGSM-RELE2%20leaflet%20_V03-EN_.pdf
Mads
It depends waht you want to d, Julian. If you want to gate internet to RF then yers you need an NoV. If you want to digi RF, then an NoV is the letter of the law, but clearly most people on APRS in the UK are either by their radios 24/7 or just do it anyway with sensible precations to stop PTT lockup. To gate Rf to the web alone doesn;t need an NoV, just an RX. That alone can be useful....
I agree, just gating RF to the web is enough for position tracking. My wish to go from internet to RF was due to my desire to make use of the APRS text messaging functions of my VX-8E. However the unreliability of messaging, the cost and trouble of setting up a gateway running 24/7 and the hassle of needing an NoV mean that I have more or less lost interest in it. I guess I'll just use my mobile phone for text messaging like everyone else and turn on my Rx-only gateway just when I want to do some tracking.
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