Caught this thread and smiled. I wanted to do a range check of a 900Mhz simpleNMEA GPS tracker in the 33cm (900Mhz) ISM band. The kit is here:Eggtimer Rocketry - EggfinderJason, KG4WSV, graciously sent me a Perl script awhile back to take a live incoming NMEA stream from the GPS tracker receiver and convert it to a "pseudo" APRS packet. One fills in their particulars in the script, calls up a terminal and run it in the command line and minimizes the live terminal. Under the "Interface" pulldown one selects "Enable server ports" (first though). That's it and the NMEA stream is converted to an APRS stream at 1/sec intervals. Now I was stuck by myself doing a range test of the 900Mhz tracker so I took my Xastir laptop outside and plugged in my NMEA receiver from he 900Mhz tracker into Xastir's GPS stream port. I took an F6A the Mobilink TNC and plugged it into and serial KISS port. I manuallychanged the config file so Xastir would digipeat once every 3 seconds instead of 5 seconds and went to a clear frequency off 144.390. I used. .800. I then fired everything up and carried the 900Mhz tracker with me and my D72A on 144.800. So, I could walk away from my SUV in the driveway with a magmount 900Mhz antenna and monitor the position and range on my D72A. Since the 2 meter band has better power and propagation, I could tell when the positions began to freeze up that I was out of range with my 900Mhz tracker from the Xastir base station all done remotely with one person. Kinda cool if you ask me. 900Mhz to 2 meters in a hacked fashion so I could do a one man test.
Now I didn't need Jason's script for this test but it does allow one to remotely monitoran NMEA stream (in this case in the unlicensed ISM band) and get it plotted on Xastiras an APRS position. His script is here: http://www.ece.uah.edu/~jdw/rockets/gps2aprs.txt Change .txt to .pl and modify the script as instructed in the comments. In this way, I can get the tracker to be displayed on Xastir. I off course have to have the tracker's receiver attached to Xastir to do so. Best regards,Kurt KC9LDH From: Den <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2017 6:02 AM Subject: [Xastir] Cross band digipeat? Can Xastir cross-band digipeat? We'd like to digipeat between 2M and 70 cm. This would be using a Pi with two TNC-Pis and of course two radios. Would like to know this can be done before purchasing the equipment. Tnx -- 73 Den W2DEN _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://xastir.org/mailman/listinfo/xastir _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://xastir.org/mailman/listinfo/xastir
