[aprssig] Help with repeater beacon

[John Gorkos]

I'm about to pull my hair out on this one.  I keep finding things I think are 
"broken" in the D710 (and probably D72, but I haven't fully tested it).
I've been consumed the last 4 weeks with building and installing a Digi on a 
mountain just outside my home QTH.  We finangled a commercial radio from 
Kenwood (thank you Phil Parton and Don Wingo), we got very nice Wacom can 
filters at dirt cheap, we are sharing a tri-band antenna at 765 feet HAAT with 
a DStar group, and I'm using a Kantronics KPC-3 with a Soekris embedded SBC 
running APRX as the controller.  The coolest part is that we're shooting a 
5.8Ghz microwave link to the top of the tower, so we have broadband internet 
access right at the digi (which we're donating to the D-Star, EchoLink, and 
eventually IRLP nodes already on the mountain, as well as to the commercial 
radio station which is giving us tower and shack space for free).
Having said all of that, the new digi is broadcasting three different beacons 
(all pulled from APRS.FI):

N4NE-1>IDENT,qAR,AJ4FJ-3:;LNCHBNCH *111111z3410.86N\08407.75WRTH1145-1300 
Lenny's Subs, Cumming,GA
N4NE-1>APRX22,TCPIP*,qAC,CORE-2:!3414.21NI08409.59W&ab0oo at arrl.net
N4NE-1>APRX22,TCPIP*,qAC,CORE-2:;147.15NGA*111111z3414.21N/08409.60Wr147.150MHz 
T143 - R60m NET2000TU Cumming,GA
The first beacon is an object sent using the Linux AX25 Tools "beacon" command.  
I think IDENT is probably the wrong destination address.
The second is a straight position packet with my contact information, and the 
third is our repeater object.
Looking on APRS.FI, all of this look great.  The Lunch Bunch icon is right 
over Lenny's Sub Shop, the repeater beam icon is right on the mountain, and 
the digi/Igate Icon is locate 15 meters east of it on the map (I used slightly 
offset coordinates for the two icons on top of the mountain).

On the GeoSat APRS 5 in my Jeep, all three Icons show up quite nicely in the 
correct location.  However on the D710, I don't get Object entries in my list:  
instead, I get N4NE-1 entries overwritten with one of the three beacon 
strings.  Specifically, I never get a 147.15NGA object with a "tunable" string 
in my station list, and I never get a LNCHBNCH object in my station list:  I 
get an N4NE-1 entry in my station list with either 147.15NGA or LNCHBNCH as 
the status string.

My D710 has the 2.03 [November 30, 2010] firmware in it.  The part that puzzles 
me is that APRS.FI and the AvMap unit both "get it right", but the D710 
doesn't seem to.

I'm BCCing my local Kenwood rep on this with the hopes that he can set me up 
with the right guys at Kenwood to actually look at "live" data with me.  I 
don't WANT to send two beacons; I want the D710 to interpret the object packet 
"correctly" like the AvMap and APRS.FI seem to, and extract the QSY 
information from an object message.  This also applies to the AVRS project:  I 
need the D710 radios to pick up the QSY information in the messages I send to 
them so we can have 1-touch worldwide voice contact.

John Gorkos
AB0OO


On Sunday, March 06, 2011 15:03:26 Guido Trentalancia wrote:
> Hello John,
> 
> did you manage to achieve what you needed ?
> 
> The very last thing I can think of is: have you tried to update the
> firmware ? Nothing like that has been ever logged in the changes for any
> new firmware release, but you never know, they might have fixed it
> already and not logged it.
> 
> That would also explain the reason why it eventually works for some
> people but not for others. Unfortunately I cannot test or help any
> further than this. In any case the alternative format that I already
> suggested you to use works for me at least with the latest firmware.
> 
> 73,
> 
> Guido IZ6RDB
> 
> On Wed, 16/02/2011 at 20.33 -0500, John Gorkos wrote:
> > Bob-
> > 
> >   This seems broken in the Kenwood implementation.  Basically, I'll have
> >   to
> > 
> > double my transmit rate to get the appropriate information out there.
> > Actually, I don't see any way to actually make this work unless I change
> > my beacon callsign to "147.15NGA" and send a position packet that looks
> > like this:
> > 147.15NGA>BEACON,WIDE2-1:111111z3414.21N/08409.60Wr147.150MHz T143 R60m
> > NET2000TU Cumming,GA de AB0OO
> > Am I misunderstanding this?  It's highly likely...
> > 
> > On Wednesday, February 16, 2011 20:16:09 Guido Trentalancia wrote:
> > > Hello John !
> > > 
> > > On Wed, 16/02/2011 at 17.37 -0500, John Gorkos wrote:
> > > > We're having some problems with the "TUNE" function of D710s and D72s
> > > > in the Atl area.
> > > > 
> > > > I'm beaconing the following text from my Tx/Igate:
> > > > ;147.15NGA*111111z3414.21N/08409.60WrT143 R60m NET2000TU Cumming,GA
> > > > which seems to match, per character, what's on the localinfo.html
> > > > page: ;FFF.FFxyz*111111zDDMM.hhN/DDDMM.hhWrTnnn RXXm NETxxxxxx
> > > > MTGxxxxx .........
> > > 
> > > Appears consistent with the specification for Frequency Objects.
> > > 
> > > The best specification, you can find it here:
> > > 
> > > http://webster-new.dmz.usna.edu/Users/aero/bruninga/aprs/freqspec.txt
> > > 
> > > > We can see the objects show up correctly in the station list of the
> > > > 710s and 72s, but no amount of pushing the "tune" button does the
> > > > trick. Meanwhile, tune DOES work for stations that include their
> > > > freq in their status text:
> > > > KD4UYP-9>S3UV8R,WIDE1-1*,WIDE2-1,qAR,AB0OO-1:`oQhn*uk/]"72}147.075MHz
> > > > =
> > > 
> > > Yes, this is consistent with what is implemented in the Kenwood
> > > TM-D710.
> > > 
> > > They have implemented what they call "QSY Function". And that works
> > > with frequency information embedded in "the first 10 bytes of the
> > > existing free-field position comment text or STATUS field".
> > > 
> > > So, if you want to tune, you have to send out beacons that report the
> > > frequency as specified in the document mentioned above according to the
> > > paragraph "APRS Frequency Formats" and not the paragraph "Frequency
> > > Objects".
> > > 
> > > As a start, you can try:
> > > >147.15 MHz T143 R60m And here you can write that it's in Cumming,GA
> > > 
> > > but that won't create an object for you. So it's two different
> > > features, but you can use both of them if needed.
> > > 
> > > 73,
> > > 
> > > Guido IZ6RDB