Well, I mentioned in my last post I was having trouble getting APRS to work, and needed to do some further troubleshooting. As it turns out, the free program direwolf is a pretty neat utility for doing many APRS tasks, including troubleshooting.
I was able to download and install direwolf, tune my alinco radio to 144.390 Mhz, and run an audio patch cord from my alinco radio to the audio-in port on my PC. From there, I was ready to have direwolf decode any APRS messages my radio could receive, and carry on troubleshooting.
Forgive the small text – the above shows the output I was able to get from direwolf, after setting my Anytone radio to operate in GPS beacon mode. Note the top 2 messages, direwolf is able to tell there is a digital message here, but notes that it’s not in the AX.25 format, and can’t cleanly decode it.
On a whim, I changed the aprs path from what I believed to be correct, ” WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2″ to just “WIDE2-2”. And success! Note the bottom 2 messages, which direwolf was able to decode successfully. Apparently my Anytone radio doesn’t operate correctly with a comma in the Path setting (and doesn’t handle that failure gracefully at all. I’m sure you’ll hear more about APRS in the future 🙂
I recently picked up a new, Chinese made, “HT” style ham radio. I had been pretty curious about what advancements have been made in the nearly 20 years since I last purchased a handheld radio. I’ve been specifically curious about some of the newer, popular digital modes (around here, UHF DMR). And my new radio, an Anytone AT-D878UV, will allow me to join the fun. Here you see the new AnyTone radio next to my old Alinco.
One of the selling points of the new radio was that it supports APRS out of the box – just fill in your callsign, and a few other details, and away it goes, happily posting your current GPS position to the APRS network.
But I was having trouble with it. Even when I had a GPS fix, the radio was sending positioning data, and I was pretty sure I was within range of an APRS gateway…my position never made it into the online database at aprs.fi. After trying a few other settings, and searching online for the problem, it was apparent that I needed to find out if my radio was sending out valid APRS packets. Stay tuned for part 2…
