[aprssig] Best Dual Band Mobile radio for APRS

[Lynn W Deffenbaugh (Mr)]

On 5/10/2024 9:29 PM, Keith Sproul via aprssig wrote:
> Hello All
>
> I am Keith Sproul, WU2Z, one of the original authors of APRS (MacAPRS and WinAPRS).  I have not been doing much Ham Radio in recent years, but am no newly retired and getting back to using APRS.
>
> I have a Yaesu FTM-400XDR in my van, and it does fine transmitting my position to APRS. It also will send APRS data out to a serial port, but it is receive ONLY, at least as far as I can figure out.  And the data isn't formatted the way it should be for feeding into an APRS program. I can fix that in the program, because I can't figure out how to fix it in the radio.

You are correct, Yaesu's APRS radios only send decoded packets to the PC 
port and does not accept packets for transmitting.  And they have their 
own format for those packets.  APRSIS32 (I know you're on *nix, but just 
in case) has specific support for Yaesu's format.

> I am installing a PC running Linux in my van with a big screen. I will be running X-APRS (MacAPRS updated to run on Linux) on this. I don't need this to transmit since the FTM-400XDR already does that, but I want to be able to receive all of th local data and display it on the screen.
>
> What dual band mobile radio is the BEST for using with a laptop running APRS?

IMNSHO, nothing beats the Kenwood D710 which is unfortunately out of 
production.   With proper software, you can actually run the radio in 
APRS mode and still have a PC-connected program take control and 
transmit when necessary.  Or you can put the radio into packet mode and 
the PC can enable KISS for the PC to have total control

> I am willing to buy a new radio, but I am having a hard time figure out what to buy.

Welcome back to the APRS world!

Lynn (D) - KJ4ERJ - Author of APRSISCE for Windows Mobile and Win32
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.tapr.org/pipermail/aprssig_lists.tapr.org/attachments/20240510/ee9fa941/attachment.htm>