[Xastir] APRS in the Galtees

[John Ronan]

Morning Folks,

I thought you might appreciate this.  Yesterday we tested APRS on the 
Galtee Mountains. We put a tracker on the 'A' Walk.  It only dawned on 
me friday evening that the version of xastir in debian didn't have 
geotiff support. So after an hour or two of compiling all the bits I 
got it sorted out.

Anyways the point of this email.  The organisers were completely blown 
away by it (they already have come to rely upon us for voice comms).

If you have  a look at http://www.ei7ig.org/images/EI2IT.png you can 
see EI2IT's track as he walked up the "ice road" up to Lough Curra and 
across to Lough Diheen.  We knew before the walkers that they were 
heading too high up (visibility was quite poor). So I called Tommy 
(EI2IT) and mentioned it to him.  One of the 'Leaders' was within 
earshot and immediately stopped to check, and as you can see they 
backtracked down quite a bit.

We've already been asked to help out on another walk in four weeks 
time, I just hope my muscles stop hurting by then :)

EI2IT was using a PocketTracker, and a Garmin Foretrex 201 (the one 
that needs batteries). My Car was stationed on a high point about 9km 
north with my TM-D700 acting as a Digipeater, and at the base I was 
using an FT-1500M to receive.

I forgot to turn on screen shots, if your interested I'll see if I can 
generate a bigger image with everything on it from the TNC logs (which 
I hope I kept).


Thanks a lot guys!

Regards
de John
EI7IG
--
John Ronan <jronan at tssg dot org>, +353-51-302938
Telecommunications Software &  Systems Group,  http://www.tssg.org