Thursday, July 08, 2010

On the road

The last couple of days I've been wasting way too much time tracking mobiles using the new Google Street View feature of aprs.fi, which since I wrote about it last is now live on the production server. I have been running a second instance of APRSIS32 linked to my K3 on 30m using the AGWPE soundcard modem. Surprisingly, I have found quite a few mobile stations beaconing their position on 30m and even more surprisingly they are often being picked up direct by my attic mounted MFJ magnetic loop. It's fun to follow these mobiles and see what they are seeing as they drive along, but I get a bit of a thrill when I see my station displayed as the one that gated their position report to the internet. I suppose it's a bit like reverse WSPR.

Yesterday and today I have been following Bernd DF8HL and his XYL Karin DF8HY who are touring Scandinavia an an old VW camper van festooned with antennas, as you can see from their website. It must be great to just tour in your mobile shack, going from one place to another, yet in touch with your friends by amateur radio. But Olga wouldn't agree, so instead I must content myself to do it virtually with the help of APRS and Google Maps.

4 comments:

Theodore said...

Too bad they are driving on the wrong side of the road!

Theodore said...

By the way I still can't get to QRZ.com, has the cloud computing turned to clod computing (forget u).

If they have in fact disappeared, I hope they refund the money to their subscribers.
Or maybe they are relocating to Nigeria.

Then again, maybe it is the president with an itchy trigger finger on the internet kill switch, or just my lame ISP.

Unknown said...

There are many people who would be happy to see QRZ.com disappear, I expect, but it's still there. Perhaps your ISP decided that its subscribers should not be exposed to such content.

Theodore said...

Yes (lol) its pretty wierd, I cannot ping it, tracert it or otherwise get to it. I have even had to disable HRD/Logbook as it just hangs.
Every other site seems to work fine.
I guessed it was still active as google references to articles timestamped today were found, but just hangs when trying to get to it.
Perhaps it is on some blacklist caused by all the flaming comments (hi).
Oh well, I will just keep looking to see if it comes back, at least I will save a bundle of time not looking at it.
Thanks Julian, happy virtual motoring.