KJ4AJW

Well on September 29th, 2008 the SCARC had a little excitement. Apparently a semi backed into a large fiber optic trunk line, which knocked out all phone and internet communications to a section of Stockbridge and McDonough. This outage also affect Henry Medical Center, including all backup communications. Of course with landlines down, the first thing that happened was the cell towers were immediately overloaded with traffic.

I know I haven't updated the site in a little bit, but I do have one piece of news. I passed the General exam on August 2, 2008. Now I just need to get some HF gear.

Anyway I will get around to posting the radio bag idea and some info about a J-pole that I built.

The cache was placed by 9:00am and is transmitting. If you want to find it online you can go to aprs.fi or findu.com.

Well it looks like this idea was a flop. I'll try again some other time.

73
KJ4AJW

Field day is almost here. June 28th between 09:00 and 19:00 hours I will have a special event cache at Eagles Landing Baptist Church. This cache will have three unactivated geocoins, that will go to the first three people to find this cache.

Click for bigger pic.

Yesterday, I got to relay my first emergency call. I was sitting in the car, parked in a Rite-Aid parking lot, monitoring one of the club repeaters. At about 4:25PM KI4WLW called out for someone to relay a 911 call. There was an accident at Hwy 155N and Hemphill Rd, two pickup trucks had just collided. I contacted 911 and relayed the report.

So, the radio is connected to the PC and soundmodem is configured and decoding APRS packets. Now it's time to put that information somewhere useful, time to install Xastir. Once again from in a terminal window enter,

OK, now that all the supplies are gathered it's time to setup the software and try to receive some APRS signals. If you have read my previous post you know that I am using Ubuntu Linux, so obviously my instructions will be focusing on a Linux based install. If anyone needs help with setting this up on Windows, please let me know and I will try to come up with a guide for Windows. If you want to try a Windows based install on your own then the checkout KC2RLM's Sound Card Packet Page, it has lots of great info. Now with all that said, let's begin.

So, I have finally ordered the transmitter and GPS modules. Now I need to setup a receiving station.

To setup a receiving station, the following items will be needed:

• A laptop with working sound card.
• APRS Software.
• TNC emulation software.
• A radio receiver capable of receiving FM radio on 144.390MHz.
• A stereo audio cable with appropriate jacks for your radio and sound card.

So, field day is coming up and I have been trying to think of an idea that would attract some non-hams to the event. I thought, why not combine Geocaching with APRS and setup an APRS enabled cache. The cache listing will contain the GPS coordinates for the field day event and once on site the cachers will need to come to me to receive the caches final coordinates via ARPS, unless they already have their own APRS equipment. Hopefully, the non-hams will be curious enough to hang around and learn a little about amateur radio.

The first hurdle is a small APRS transmitter.