[aprssig] More Kayak and APRS

[Kevin Sherwood]

Having anything on land not properly licensed (usually a marina or port facility) broadcast on marine VHF is illegal.  Setting up a DSC receiver in your car is fine, and broadcasting your position from a marine VHF with DSC while on the kayak is fine.

Even though marine VHF will have the same issues with range as 2m, the 300 baud transmission mode of DSC may be more likely to be received cleanly.  

A handheld VHF with DSC costs around $250, but then you'd need to put together the interface to take the receiver's output and retransmit on APRS.  

One real benefit of DSC is if you have an issue, there are likely to be far more marine VHF receivers around listening than there are APRS.



AIS is a different system from DSC.

Kevin
KB3PLX

--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: hellan at acm.org
To: aprssig at lists.tapr.org
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:03:02 +0200
Subject: Re: [aprssig] more kayak and aprs

jimlux wrote:
 
> I've just started looking into this, but it looks like the VHF/DSC is 
> "on button push", not automatic, as in APRS.  There appears to be some 
> sort of "pull" or query mechanism where one VHF/DSC station can ask for 
> the position of another, so in my scenario, the station in the car would 
> be doing this.  However, there's probably some legal prohibition against 
> automated actions like this.
 
Sounds like you're looking for AIS class B. (AIS class A is for commercial 
shipping). Could be a bit bulky for a kayak, though, and APRS would be much 
cheaper.
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