[Xastir] APRS for Bike Tours

[Jason Godfrey]

Hello.

I was just browsing the list archives, and saw this question from Mike
Benonis from about two weeks ago:

> By the way, as a more general question to those who have used APRS for
> bike tours/races, does anyone have any tips for a smooth event?

I'm not sure if it is too late for him, but since we just had the
Minnesota MS150 last weekend I thought I would comment.

In past years we've had APRS beacons on all of our sag wagons and few
other key vehicles and a full APRS station at net control. This year
we decided to expand and add a full APRS station at each rest stop as
well as on the Incident Response Team vehicles (the IRTs may of had a
full station past years, I forget.) Another key decision was was to
add a dedicated APRS op to net control.

The expanded use APRS helped quite a bit, especially in the view of
our longtime net control supervisor. He felt it reduced his workload
noticeably. Using APRS messaging for lower priority messages kept
traffic off of our UHF voice backbone. The use of objects to track
rider pickups, incidents, and other issues helped with situational
awareness, and in the case of IRT's - finding where we sent them.

A couple of points of things that can help for a smooth event:

1. Training and testing before the event. Make sure the equipment
works and the operators who are going to be using it know how to.

2. Check digipeater coverage. We had to add in some for the event.
(And unfortunately one wasn't working, which impacted coverage on
Sunday.)

3. For net control at least - Listen to both RF and IGATE if you can.
Sometimes messages/objects come in one interface and not the other.

4. Having a dedicated APRS op at net control is very helpful. The
person(s) running the voice net is too busy to use APRS effectively by
himself.

5. Use APRS for more then just tracking vehicles. Objects and
messaging are useful.

I think that covers the highlights.

- Jason, N0RPM

-- 
I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.
 -- Wernher von Braun