The APRS digipeater MB7VX has been offline for quite a while now. I’m not going to bring it back any time soon and I have applied for a second NoV to release the frequency and callsign.
The original MB7VX setup using a donated Tait 2 meter radio and a 13.8 volt power supply from the local club junk sale
Me and Ana travelled to Cambridge last weekend for the Debian UK BBQ. We travelled by train and it was a rather scenic journey. In the past, on long journeys, I’ve used APRS-IS to beacon my location and plot my route but I have recently obtained the GPS module for my Yaesu VX-8DE and I thought I’d give some real RF APRS a go this time.
While the APRS IGate coverage in the UK is a little disappointing, as is evidenced by the map, a few cool things did happen. I recieved a simplex APRS message from a radio amateur 2M0RRT with the text “test test IO86ML” (but unfortunately didn’t notice until we’d long passed by, sorry for not replying!) and quite a few of my packets, sent from a 5 watt handheld in Cambridge, were heard by the station M0BPQ-1 in North London (digipeated by MB7UM).
The Internet is starting to catch on. In a few years time, we may have Internet connections in nearly every major city across the UK. The real issue that needs to be looked at here is how does this new-fangled technology fit in with Amateur Radio?
I assist with the running of MB7VX, an APRS digipeater hosted at the University of Aberdeen. This station is run under a NoV issued by Ofcom that states that it can be configured only as an “APRS Digipeater”. The recieved packets from this station are copied to a software component that injects the packets into the APRS-IS service, which is Internet based.