[aprssig] APRS Newbie - Overwhelmed

[Robert Bruninga]

➢ I am wanting to get into APRS and am ... overwhelmed.
> I... gather APRS depends on a lot of digipeaters.. to ...relay...to
> others...
> as well as upload the data to the http://aprs.fi system,

Digipeaters are usually stand alone and consist of nothing but a radio and a
TNC.  The injection of data into the internet is a separate function done by
IGates.  And almost any APRS client software running on a PC that is also
connected to the internet becomes an IGated.

> What are the procedures for putting a digi in place?

Just put it up if there is an area that has little or no coverage.  That
means, a mobile driving through and transmitting 2 hops either using WIDE2-2
or using WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 will generally show up on APRS.FI or FINDU.COM.
Also click on the APRS.FI range circles button on the right side and see the
overlapping coverages of all other digis.  But take that with a grain of
salt.  Some people put in verly ambitiouns range circles significantly
beyond their actual range and some areas are just so congested that nothing
works because of channel overload.

Portable digis are vry common to temporarily serve a non-covered area for a
specific event or emergency.

And if you see a mobile with a Kenwood APRS mobile radio, then it has
automatically the ablility to digipeater one hop via TEMP1-1.    So for a
special event, just go park a Kenwood mobile on top of a hill and all
surrounding stations transmitting Vvia TEMP1-1,WIDE2-1 should get out via
that temporary digi and the owner of that Kenwood radio did not even have to
do a thing to activatge it.  By default UITRACE is set to TEMP in all
kenwood radios.

Bob, WB4APR

Hope that helps
Bob, WB4APR