A quick call on 145.500 before our picnic lunch raised no-one. I did hear a G7 who was raising money for the lifeboat association but he didn't hear me.After lunch I called again and was replied to by Keith, G0EMM in Workington, who was alerted to my call by his daughter (thanks Rebecca!) After a chat with Keith I was called by Steve, M0IGG on Walney Island. He was a strong 59 signal and I thought the island must be in the Solway which I could see from my summit location, so I was amazed to be told Walney Island is in Morecambe Bay off the south coast of Cumbria. The entire Lake District was between us, but I have had good signals from the south Lakes on Binsey before and can only assume that some kind of ducting occurs.
Whilst I was there Lynn, KJ4ERJ, author of the APRSISCE software sent me an APRS message. He had spotted my movements and realized I was off for a hike. The software performed very well, but I turned the phone off on the summit to save the battery and obviously didn't wait long enough to get a fix after turning it on again so it didn't track our descent.
I forgot to turn the phone off while it was in my jacket in the locker at Armathwaite Hall and returned to find a rather hot phone displaying some odd error messages that I couldn't get rid of and a low battery, so I turned it off completely until we got home.
It turns out I wasn't the only person out on the Lakeland fells with a radio today, however I missed the activity by M3WJZ/P and M3ZOO/P that was spotted on the WOTA website as I had switched the APRS WOTA alerts to a bulletin message which APRSISCE doesn't support yet.
Sadly I have been told by Steve Dimse who runs findu.com that I shouldn't be using his CGI script to send APRS messages from the WOTA server as "use of findU by machines is not permitted" and if I want to do that I should connect to the APRS network myself and send the messages. Unfortunately I have neither the technical knowledge nor, probably, the necessary permissions on the web server to write and run my own CGI script. If anyone can help me out with that I'd appreciate it. In the meantime I'm just hoping Steve doesn't notice the very occasional WOTA bulletin message because I think it's a very useful facility that could do a lot to encourage the use of APRS in this neck of the woods.
Hi Julian,
ReplyDeleteThat's rather disappointing news from Findu, maybe http://dcc.openaprs.net could solve the issue if I understand it correctly.
73, Peter (2E0SQL)
Hi Peter.
ReplyDeleteI have looked at that page myself and scratched my head a lot over it. I think it might solve the problem if I had the assistance of someone clever enough to make use of it, but it looks a bit beyond my level of expertise.
Intriguing and creative idea for the use of APRS bulletins (which will eventually be supported in APRSISCE), however, I can see one limitation to any method of injecting them into APRS-IS (the Internet side). Any APRS mobile that is RF only (VX8r, D7, D700, D710 and the upcoming FT-350 as well as anything with an external TNC) will not hear the bulletins unless you have the cooperation of a local IGate operator to gate them from the Internet to RF. Even that gets a bit dicey when thinking of how to filter the traffic so that only the bulletins of interest get gated.
ReplyDeleteHm, something more to think about as I add more features to my APRS client...
Thanks for taking us along on the hike, even though your picture looks a bit blustery for us Florida residents!
73, Lynn (D) - KJ4ERJ
Hi Lynn.
ReplyDeleteI had considered that problem, and in fact on the WOTA site I mention that people will have to get local IGates and digipeaters to transmit the WOTA bulletins. Since the bulletins are of regional interest it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask them to do this, but whether they will or not is another matter.
The only alternative I can think of is to send a message to each interested participant. When I used the VX-8E and ran my own IGate to support it I did address messages specifically to G4ILO-7, but I still had to configure the IGate to transmit them. All the experts told me it should do that automatically if it received transmissions from me, but neither UI-View nor Xastir would transmit the messages until I forced them to, so it seems to be that using bulletins is no worse a solution and is more economical of APRS network usage.
Boy that looks cold but great fun! Useless me trying to enter the computer dilemma as I know next to nothing about such things. Hope the sauna warmed you up afterwards, though! 73 Adam
ReplyDelete