Additional Services

While APRS is fantastic for vehicle position reporting, APRS is a whole lot more.  The intention of APRS is real time event reporting, where GPS made real time vehicle location a reality.

The potential for APRS to be useful in an Emcomm situation is is fantastic, recently an add on for UIView became available to properly implement the Bulletin Board (http://www.apritch.myby.co.uk/addon.htm), this brings another key piece of functionality to the operator without requiring 100% attention to the display.

Other services available via APRS in the Brisbane area are on the 70cm national APRS frequency, 439.100.  These are in addition to the standard IGate functions.  Note that the traffic on this frequency is heavy as all satellite, earthquakes, cyclones, VK and ZL stations are gated from the IS to RF.  Mobiles may have trouble getting gated on this frequency hence it is suggested that this frequency is more suited to home or portable stations.

1. Message Store and Forward - send a message to VK4TGV-2, the message should contain the target station, #, message.  E.g. VK4TGV-7#Why are you driving around? The system will store the message and forward it on when the target station next beacons.

2. Info Kiosk - very much work in progress.  Send ?INFO to VK4TGV-2 for a list of commands.  Please feel to send comments and suggestions how this service can be made more useful.

3. DXCluster - DX Spots from the worldwide DX cluster feed is interlaced between the VK and ZL beacons.  Use UIDXBridge (http://www.apritch.myby.co.uk/addon_agw.htm#uidx) to display the spots in a tidy fashion (AGWPE required, http://www.sv2agw.com/downloads/default.htm).