Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
I think this was my third or fourth attempt, but I just successfully bounced a packet off of the ISS as it passed over this evening – if I understand this right, the red highlighted message is my message as I received it coming back from RS0SS (the callsign for the packet digipeater on the ISS):
On yesterday’s pass I realized too late that the AGWTerminal software doesn’t send unproto packets needed to send packets via the ISS. I’ve now downloaded UISS, got it sent up and checked into the Sacramento Valley Sunday evening packet net, so looks like everything is good to go.
On this evening’s pass, I started sending my cq unproto packets, but looks like I wasn’t heard. I’m wondering after reading around that my ‘via’ value should be ARISS and not RS0ISS that I was using. Apparently your via should be ARISS, but the packets recevied from the digipeater on the ISS will come from RS0ISS. So, will give it another try on the next pass at a good time.
Here’s the packets I received this evening:
Fm K7LWV-6 To APRS Via RS0ISS* <UI pid=F0 Len=47 >[21:08:50]
=4454.96N/12319.98W`Dallas, OR Via ISS {UISS53}
Fm K7LWV-6 To APRS Via RS0ISS* <UI pid=F0 Len=33 >[21:08:59]
:NWS :Hello from Dallas, OR!
Fm N7HQB To CQ Via RS0ISS* <UI pid=F0 Len=45 >[21:09:04] =40.637569n/111.931580w/Hello From SLC Utah!
Since having my Amateur Radio license just over a year, I’ve yet to go all out on a contest and work every hour permitted, but I have enjoyed the opportunity to work some contacts for my log. Last year’s California QSO Party I only worked a few QSOs. If I remember back to last year, I did call CQ for 20 mins or so and didn’t get any takers, so did some search and pounce and picked up a handful of contacts:
This year I worked a couple of hours over Sat and Sun, and got significantly more that my 8 QSOs last year, but nowhere close to K6Y’s score. I’ve submitted my log and will wait for the final scores to be published 🙂 All in all, had a good result this year!
The 880H supports a couple of different approaches to using DSTAR:
The regular memory approach is probably the easiest the understand in terms of how memories would be used in a non-DSTAR mode, but given that you will likely want to send link/unlink commands to the repeater, this would mean each of these combinations would occupy one additional memory.
The DR Mode uses one memory for the common repeater settings, and then you select the variable parts for UR, RPT1, RPT2 etc as needed.
If you follow the instructions in the 880H manual for configuring DR Mode, it talks about three settings, GRP CQ, GRP RPT, and GRP UR. The manual is not very clear about the difference in these modes relating to your UR, RPT1, RPT2, and MY settings however. So here’s my understanding of the differences:
I read somewhere that you should use UR of DRCQCQ to indicate that you’re using DR mode to force the repeater to see this as destined not only for the repeater and include the gateway routing info too (RPT2). I don’t think this solves the issue of GRP CQ though, which seems to intentionally remove the RPT2 value – changing the default UR of CQCQCQ to DRCQCQ I don’t think has any effect.
So in summary, if you’re intending to get forwarded out from your repeater’s gateway, use the GRP UR mode.
I got this tip from this post here.
A few other random observations:
I’ll summarize a few other tips later.