Since I couldn’t find a succinct step by step guide for getting this new radio setup for APRS I figured I would take a swing at it myself.
- Create a channel for APRS
- Use either the iphone or android app to setup a channel for your countries APRS frequency (144. 390MHz for U.S.)
- This channel shouldn’t use any ctcss tones or any other repeater settings
- I have been setting channel 30 in each channel group as the APRS channel
- Set the Settings from the radio settings menu
- Menu -> General Settings -> APRS Settings
- Call Sign: Enter your call sign
- Path: WIDE1-1, WIDE2-2
- Digital Mode
- Enable: Check
- Share Location: Set a time – I chose 360sec
- Digital Channel: Choose the channel you configured from step 1
- Format: APRS (BSS seems to be a proprietary BTECH protocol, which I want to do a deep dive on eventually)
- Menu -> General Settings -> APRS Settings
That should do it! Now just navigate to aprs.fi and wait to make sure your packets are getting picked up somewhere. Luckily I live within a mile of the nearest igate so I quickly started seeing my packets on the map.
I haven’t received any packets yet on the actual radio, but I have read a few reports online that folks weren’t able to decode packets until they turned their squelch completely off. That would be a real shame if that was required for it to work since that would essentially make the radio single purpose while use APRS. I don’t want to listen to static while walking around.
Since I wasn’t able to find this answer elsewhere online, it’s worth mentioning that APRS will continue to operate in the background until you turn it off. You can transmit on other channels, listen to FM radio, anything you want. You won’t even hear your packets going out, it will just transmit them without notifying you at all.
Practical Prepping 