[CRAPRS] Tom WE0F APRS tracking

[gdbishop at rockwellcollins.com]

Rod's recent post about Tom Heifner's hiking trip had a link to 
findu.com.  There is some good information there, but also try and poke
around at:  www.db0anf.de/app/aprs
This sight is a little slow, so have patience.  However, it displays 
different
types of information that you can't easily get at findu.  Type in Tom's 
call 
as WE0F-5.  DB0ANF won't let you use a wild card SSID like findu will.

Anyway, his last report was about 2 days ago, probably as he left his 
vehicle to head out into the wilderness.  From the onset, we expected the
odds of many packets to be low.  Searching for nearby activity revealed 
only
a few hits, and the closest digi's are about 25 miles away, across some 
pretty
rocky terrain.  'Rocky' both in terms of traversing the terrain, and RF 
propagation
across such terrain.

I provided him with a portable digi he was going to leave running in his 
car.
He will connect it to his normal mobile 2M antenna.  The thought was if 
his 
portable/hiking packets could make it back to his car,
the portable digi would have a better chance of reaching any other nearby 
digi.   'Chance' as used here is reckoned to be between 0 and 25%. 
However, 
it would cost him nothing to leave it running, and it just might squirt 
out a 
few bits.  The portable digi is battery operated, and should run just 
about as
long as he plans to be out there:  about 6 days.  We didn't want to use 
vehicle
battery power, just in case it might run his car battery down.  Bad scene 
in
the wilderness of western Canada.  At the present, it doesn't appear the
digipeater is active.

After his stint with the bears in Branff Park, he moseys on over to 
another
park for 3 more days of communing with nature.  During that time, he will 
leave the portable digi plugged into his car. 


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