So, this morning I decided to give my OpenTracker another run, both to get a feel for how some of the parameters worked, as well as just trying to find out how complete the coverage is here in the Bay Area.

For this test, I first modified the APRS symbol to stop being the balloon that I had yesterday (symbol “/O”) and switched it instead to the car icon (symbol “/>”). I also turned on “smartbeaconing”, (described here) so that it would beacon more frequently as my speed increases, and also beacon when I made turns of more than 28 degrees. I then embarked upon my commute. It worked pretty well, with a few caveats.

On the main highway, coverage was in general excellent, but in the areas directly surrounding my home (which has quite a few hills) the coverage is much spottier. Even where coverage is good, most of the digipeaters here me are across the bay on San Francisco peninsula or are north, with distances that are quite large (and perhaps surprising, given the fact that I am transmitting with only 5w of output power). I’m wondering, is there some way to locate all the digipeaters that are active in a given geographic region? I’m interested in terms of my balloon planning: while I am going to be carrying an APRS equipped mobile rig in the chase vehicle, it would also be nice to know that our data has a good chance of making it to the APRS-IS network so that people could track it over the Internet, and to serve as a backup for our mobile operations.

Anyway… more on it all later.