On Jun 25, 2007, at 7:25 PM, Jim Tolbert wrote:
Garmin Rinos within 5 miles of the search incident command would be a workable alternative.
This seems pretty optimistic. I don't know about the Rinos, but in my very limited experience with FRS radios 5mi seems to be a bit much for them, unless one is on a mountain and has a straight shot to the other. I would think that the data range would be even less than the voice range.
I don't know about Cygwin support for GPSman (again, haven't tried that myself), but if Cygwin doesn't work, using the virtual machine with VMware player will work. The VM is noticeably faster, in my experience, than Cygwin.
As for a more optimum solution, if the units in the field don't need to track other units, a basic HT with an opentracker and GPS would do nicely. Buying new, one could put these together for probably $225 - $250 each.
If the units in the field _do_ need to track the others, currently the optimum solution is the Kenwood D7 + a mapping GPS. A bonus in using the D7 is that it's a dual band radio, so it could be used for voice communications as well as data. This is a $500+ solution. There is a new Opentracker in the works that would do it cheaper, but it's not in production yet.
Of course, all these ham radio solutions assume everyone is licensed and all that good stuff. Trackers can be put together on other bands, but if the county's radio infrastructure is already limited there probably isn't anything left lying around for conversion to trackers.
-Jason kg4wsv _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
