Category: Overland & Offroad

APRS – Ham Radio Special Modes:

One of the great strengths of Amateur Radio is how flexible the hobby is. One type of operation that is very interesting for the Overlander is called APRS. (Amateur Position Reporting System) APRS takes raw NEMA2 data from a GPS, encodes it, and transmits it over the amateur bands. A simple APRS Transmitter/Receiver can be built by connecting an inexpensive handheld transceiver (around $35 on Amazon) to an Android Phone or Tablet with a GPS, and then installing a $4.95 piece of software called APRSdroid. This APRS site can then simultaneously transmit your coordinates, as well as display the near real-time locations of every other APRS station within receiving distance. Imagine a caravan of five vehicles, each with an small APRSdroid powered APRS system in their vehicles, with the map display turned on.

Android Phone, and Baofeng UV-3R

Map Display

It’s no big secret I have a bunch of radios in my truck. In fact one of my next posts will highlight what I have installed in my Mobile Antenna Farm.

One of the radios installed though is a 10w Byonics Microtrak-RTG APRS Transmitter. If you’re not familiar with APRS take a second to read a little about it.

While driving through the mountains on the Rimrocker Trail my APRS transmitter was happily sending out telemetry data every 5 minutes (because I was traveling less than 60 miles per hour) or every time I had a more than a 14 degree change in direction. Because of the range 2m has while in the mountains (Line of sight from 9,000 feet is a long way.) I actually have a pretty complete picture of where we traveled.

APRS isn’t as perfect as plotting your own maps with an onboard GPS and Tracking software, but it’s kind of neat to know that the family of one of the guys with us could fairly reliably track our progress through the Rocky Mountains.