[Operation] New digipeater/igate in Huntsville
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VE3MOW - 2019, October 24 - 10:49
I have placed my FT-2900R and an old i3 laptop into digipeater/igate operation in order to fill in some of the APRS gap in Huntsville. I noticed there was no APRS coverage over here, so I have set out to change that.
From what http://aprs.fi shows, I have about a 10.8km range and have received station from up to 15km away at times. (Not counting the stations from 100km+ away cause those aren't daily and tend to happen only early mornings....)
If you have any two meter gear lying around collecting dust, I would suggest setting it up as a digipeater/igate and giving it a new life. If you need a TNC, there's direwolf for the PC or I can flash an Arduino Uno to work as a TNC for you.
Hopefully as time goes on, I can make another station and work with the town to place it somewhere like the lookout for better coverage.
I know this isn't much, but I am doing what I can to give back to the wonderful hobby that we all share.
Coverage: https://aprs.fi/#!v=gated&call=a/VE3MOW-11&timerange=9600&tail=9600
Station: https://m.imgur.com/a/H8Lson0
Operating:
Forums:
Info:
Software:
Radio:
Updates to this...
It appears that some time a few months ago my homebrew sound interface up and died on the igate and this has gone unnoticed because I have the radio tower and its gear on a separate network and it mostly just runs on its own without me messing with it.
I discovered the issue about a week ago and as of this morning the igate has been refitted with a signalink interface and is back on the air with a very loose filter for allowing traffic both ways. Currently the server-side filter is set to m/50 (any packets within 50km of me) and the client-side filter is set to u/* which should allow all "local" traffic through. Digipeating is enabled and there is a limited of 3 packets per minute and 7 packets per five minutes placed on packets that come from the internet.
Antenna is 32ft up on the tower and the ft-2900r is set to 30 watts output. I apologize if anyone was making use of the igate, I wasn't aware that it had gone down. I kinda stopped using it after my adventures with my HT didn't work out. It is repaired now.