[aprssig] itty bitty laptop

[William McKeehan]

I'm imagining this as a replacement for my D700's APRS display and my GPS
display. So the no hard drive thing will be good - 16GB of flash storage
should be plenty. The small screen is not so small when compared to the screen
on my current GPS (Garmin GPS V). The battery life will be supplemented by an
external source from the vehicle, so that's no problem either.

But if I wanted to use it portable, the battery would be an issue. Given it's
short boot time, I wonder....

It seems like it would be nice to have an APRS "recorder" that you could
connect to a radio and have it record all of the APRS packets that it receives
(optionally giving you a audible/visual notification if it receives a message
for you), allowing you to connect to the device periodically and download all
of the data. This way, you could turn the computer off when you're not using
it and turn it on when you need to see something or respond to a message. That
to me sounds like the ultimate tracker.

-- 
William McKeehan

On Thu, June 21, 2007 10:27 am, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2007, William McKeehan wrote:
>
>> I think this has a lot of potential:
>>
>> <http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/06/06/Asustek-$199-Eee-PC_1.html?source=NLC-\HARDWARE&cgd=2007-06-06>
>
> No hard drive, they use flash memory instead.  Xandros(Linux) OS.
> Small screen.  3 hours on a battery.  Very inexpensive ($200).
> It should be very quiet and the article says it doesn't get hot to
> the touch.
>
> Since it's already running Linux it shouldn't be difficult to get
> Xastir compiled for it and install a bunch of maps.  If it doesn't
> have a compile environment you'd have to compile on another machine
> with the same libraries (probably running the same version of
> Xandros) then move the code over to the laptop.
>
> --
> Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
> "Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
> "Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
> "The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
>
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