Hey, a milestone for me. During my morning commute, I managed to actually send a position report to the amateur radio satellite GO-32, which got picked up by W7KKE in Lincoln City, Oregon, a distance of 810 miles, not bad! I wasn’t sure it had worked, but I noticed that I had received some packets from W7KKE, so I thought I’d do a web search and potentially send him a message and ask him some questions about APRS, but I found this website in finland which archives APRS gateway information by callsign. Sure enough, as I glance down the page, I noticed that he actually reported that he had heard me! Indeed, the gateway created a record for me as a bonus. Nifty!

All of this is probably jibberish to a lot of you. If you don’t already know what APRS is or what GO-32 is, you probably are completely lost. Never fear: I’m having so much fun with this stuff, I am going to try to make a couple of introductory pages on how this stuff all works and what it’s all about over the next few days. Stay tuned.

Addendum: The record I sent indicated that I was using a TH-D7A and an Arrow antenna. While I was using the TH-D7A (pictured at the right), I was just using a little magmount omnidirectional antenna on the roof of my car. The radio puts out about 5 watts. It’s pretty impressive that this works at all.


Addendum²: If you click the tiny map on the right, you can see a screen dump of my position on a Google Map.


[tags]Amateur Radio,KF6KYI,W7KKE,Satgate,GO-32[/tags]