[aprssig] The Ultimate APRS portable net control station ?

[William McKeehan]

I worked another event this past weekend; it was a 27/50/62 mile bike ride. A
couple of guys had APRS and I played with keeping track of the action with
Xastir.

Walking away from that event, I got an idea about a way to improve my setup.

I have a D700 in my vehicle. I am planning to put a Linux computer in the
vehicle, connected to the D700. I will have the computer running javAPRSSrvr
acting as a Digi. In addition, I will connect the computer to a wireless hub.
I will use my laptop to wirelessly connect to the computer in the car. On the
laptop, I can run any APRS program that can talk to an Internet server (which
my car computer will look like). This will let me take my laptop to a better
location for humans without having to take all of the wires for the radio,
etc. In addition, I was thinking that if my vehicle is at a good location then
I could have a web server on the computer serving up a javaAPRS page; this
would let anyone with a wireless connection be able to see what's going on.
I'm thinking about having an "home" page that would give them links to the
overall view of the ride, then links to find specific assets.

In thinking about this, I came to the realization that this box could be a
real asset to tracking what's going on. I was thinking about adding a
blog-type system for Net Control to enter in their "log" events. These would
then be available to anyone (within the area of my vehicle).

So now I put this question to those of you that have done a lot of events like
this and used APRS. Do you think such a computer setup would be useful? What
features/functions would you think should be available via this computer?

Thanks for the input.

-- 
William McKeehan
KI4HDU
Internet: mckeehan at mckeehan.homeip.net
http://mckeehan.homeip.net