http:\/\/aprs.mountainlake.k12.mn.us\/map#<\/a> online VHF propagation map this morning and saw all sorts of yellow and red blobs on top of\u00a0 my area.\u00a0 So I fired up the FT-726R on 144.200 and made a few contacts.\u00a0 The farthest away was over in Georgia, north of Atlanta.<\/p>\nI believe the propagation map is based on APRS packet data.\u00a0 APRS\u00a0 is a packet radio system on the 2 meter band (144 mHz) which is used for a variety of things.\u00a0 Most people use it for location services; you can buy a “tracker” and hook it to a GPS and a radio.\u00a0 Those items work together to transmit a periodic position report using the GPS coordinates.\u00a0 There are various gateways of that radio data on to the internet. Besides the mobile systems there are also fixed-site digipeaters which act as packet relay stations.<\/p>\n
So, I believe the mountainlake.k12 people are sorting through the APRS internet data stream and mapping out connections between points (probably the digipeaters),\u00a0 finding those longer than what is normally seen.\u00a0 It seems to work very well.\u00a0 When the local APRS nodes are seeing a wider range of neighbors then I should be able to get out farther on that band also.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: Watson road (3.5 miles) with wife and dog] I checked out the http:\/\/aprs.mountainlake.k12.mn.us\/map# online VHF propagation map this morning and saw all sorts of yellow and red blobs on top of\u00a0 my area.\u00a0 So I fired up the FT-726R on 144.200 and made a few contacts.\u00a0 The farthest away was over in Georgia, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio","category-operating"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1887"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1888,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions\/1888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}