[aprssig] motorcycle mobile tracker

[Matt Steinhoff]

> I completed a 3,860 mile ride about a week ago.
> Are the digis that sparse along my route or do I
> just need a few more watts?

    I'm not sure what is needed but my experience is
similar to yours. The only difference is that I am
running a Kenwood D700 and not a pocket tracker. I'm
not sure 50 watts and a full-sized antenna is going
to resolve your problem.

    At least once a year, my family does a 3,000+ mile
road trip starting in Florida.
    After 15 years of wanting to be a ham, I finally
got my ticket in 2001 so I could do APRS. It was the
'killer app' that put me over the edge. While an
amazing idea, APRS never really works the way I want
it to work. My goal is to have my position show up on
the web so folks not traveling with us can see where
we are.
    What I have found is spotty coverage even in
areas where I am receiving other people's positions.

    I think part of the problem is that the recommended
paths keep changing. I'm positive the changes are for
the betterment of all hamkind but it is troublesome to
end users. (Ie: me {grin}.)
    In the decade or so APRS has been around, I can
think of four or five different recommended, 'universal'
paths. Updating all the digipeters to use the new paths
is a non-trivial task, I'm sure, not to mention the
20,000 or so users who also have to change paths.
    Because the digis and stations don't move in sync,
there will be path mismatches. When that happens, there
are digis which hear a packet and do nothing. The
packet just drops on the floor.
    Digi coverage outside of major metropolitan areas is
still fairly sparse. Igate coverage is even more sparse.
So, when the one digi for 50-100 miles that can hear you
won't relay your packets, that's a problem. That makes
for huge gaps for travelers.

    When traveling in America's West, I knew digis were
few and far between so on a trip a couple years ago, I
wanted to try PCSat. Only problem was, in order to use
it, I had to log into the internet to see what the path
du jour was. (There were power problems with the sat, if
I remember correctly, requiring  reboots, resets and
other such manual interventions.) Eventually, I gave up
trying to hit the bird because there was too much
overhead for a fun family vacation.

    The last week of June, we're leaving on a trip from
South Florida to Tulsa, OK, up to St. Louis and then
back to Florida by way of North Carolina. It'll be up
nearly 4,000 miles by the time we roll into our driveway
a couple weeks later.
    After catching up on a backlog of 1,600 message to
this list (I started reading from February this morning),
I'm still not sure what the best default path will be for
my trip.
    'WIDE2-2' is what I use in town. Will that work
everywhere and get me onto the internet? Knowing that
I'll be covering sparsely-populated areas, is 'WIDE3-3'
a better path? Is 'WIDE1-1, WIDE2-2' more reliable?
Should I assume that there are more digis still using
the old path paradigm and go with that old, classic
path 'RELAY,WIDE'? Since my goal is the internet, how
about 'REALLYWIDE,INTERNET,FINDU,WWW'?

    I don't want anyone to take my generalized APRS angst
the wrong way. I love APRS and those who run digis and
design the ARPS network have my complete respect. Digi
coordination must be maddeningly frustrating as the only
thing everyone seems to agree upon is the frequency.
Woops... Except that I just read about using an alternate
input frequency for locals is a good idea. I guess even
the frequency isn't set in stone. {grin}

    After I get back to town, I'll report on what path I
used and how I think I did in terms of getting into findu.

    Matt / k4mls