W2MMD Satellite Blog

APRS Weather from the GCARC Clubhouse “So now that we have a weather station at the clubhouse, why aren’t we broadcasting real-time weather thru APRS?” said John Zaruba K2ZA one day, signaling the start of another GCARC Skunkworks project. The weather station (a topic for another article) was up and running and its output could be viewed from a web server on the clubhouse network, but without a VPN connection to the clubhouse (or being physically present there) nobody could see it. And the clubhouse weather was getting increasingly important with the upcoming heat of summer since we wanted to monitor the temperature inside the satellite room because several computers are running 24/7 there. In addition, several of us are working with the Cooper Health System emergency communications team and planning to use APRS as a means to report from remote healthcare facilities, so it made sense for us to get familiar with creating customized APRS messages and figuring out how to transmit and ...

The GCARC 2018 Field Day Satellite Station Field Day brings out the creativity in hams since we have to adapt our typical operating configurations and practices to a completely different setting. This was also true for the satellite team (K2QA, K2ZA, N3PUU, KD2RPE and WB2MNF) as we prepared for the 2018 event. Under Field Day rules stations receive 100 bonus points for the first satellite contact, so obtaining this contact is significant to our point score. Last year we barely made it - we made our first and only contact on the last satellite pass of the event, so this year we wanted to be far better prepared. As in any ham station, there are three primary components - the receiver, the transmitter, and the antennas. For satellite receiving we long ago migrated to software defined radio, so I had to build out my laptop for SDR. This meant installing the PST Rotator program that manages the antennas and sets the frequencies on the radios, the SDR Console program for visualizing a...