GREAT APRS SETUPS FOR THE TM-D700 MOBILE 21 Jun 2014 --------------------------------------------------------------------- WB4APR Revised 21 Oct 2014 to include D700 settings as permanent digipeaters Revised 19 May 2010 Revised 10 May 2007 and 3 Jan 2008 Original 6 Jun 2005 First, see the POWERPOINT: www.aprs.org/APRS-mobile.ppt It is important to properly set up your APRS radio inorder to get the best APRS mobile experience not only for normal terrestrial APRS operations and satellites, but also voice and traffic reporting as well. NORMAL APRS OPERATIONS: ----------------------- BAND-B: Use this band for your voice operations. Use it on 2m, 440 or even receiving on 1296 FM and many other commercial bands. CALL CHANNEL: Save 146.52 MHz voice simplex in your CALL CHANNEL. This is important for making QUICK mobile QSO's... The D710 even has diffeent CALL channels on the A and B side. BAND-A: Set for APRS on 144.39, 1200 baud, TNC on band A. Set path to WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 in most areas, never more hops without serious thought. LEAVE THE VOLUME UP. You will control what you hear on the APRS channel by what APRS "channel" you have selected. This lets the APRS channel be used for data and Voice Alert. Set band A CTCSS to 100 Hz for Voice Alert with volume up. Save in memory 0 or wherever. Be sure to set Band A squelch way up so that the BUSY indication goes out between packets or your rig will never transmit APRS. The tightness has no affect on APRS, but if it opens and BUSY shows, the radio will never transmit packet. SET MENU RADIO-DISPLAY-KEY_FUNCTION-MODE 3 Without this, the radio is practically uselsess for APRS, because you have to push-and-hold-1-sec even to access any APRS front panel keys. Without this, APRS is just too hard to operate for display of information and becomes just another one-way tracker. SET MENU RADIO-MEMORY-AUTO_PM_STORE OFF. Without this, you can not save your favorite configurations in any of the PM's and have any hope that they will remain uncorrupted during operation. The default is ON, which means that everytime you use the radio, it will auto- matically save (overwrite) your favorite settings with whatever you were last doing with the radio. This is bad. Leave it OFF. That way once you have the radio configured and saved in a PM, then you can always go back to that by selecting that PM. So, now SAVE your APRS configureation in a PM. while the band A channel is the one with 144.39 and CTCSS 100 for voice alert. MEMORIES: Store this APRS/Voice Alert channel with CTCSS 100 in memory, say memory 0. Label it as "APRS VA". Now turn CTCSS OFF and run this open squelch. Save this in say memory 1 with the channel name of "APRS raw". Now turn CTCSS ON again, and program it with CTCSS xxx (your private CTCSS). Save this in channel 2 for example and name it "APRSmute". With these 3 channels then you can easily configure APRS on the fly: Ch1 "APRS VA " 144.39 Voice Alert, CTCSS 100 for normal operations Ch2 "APRS raw" 144.39 no tone squelch - for troubleshooting Ch3 "APRSmute" 144.39 CTCSS 123 - for completely QUIET operation The real purpose of channel 3 is if you go to a club meeting or hamfest and there are so many voice alert operators that the noise is bothering you. DO NOT TURN DOWN SIDE A VOLUME! Instead, set channel 3 and you will not hear anything. THe reason for this is that if you ever turn the volulme down, you will forget and it might be weeks or months before you realize it and in the mean time you were out of Voice Contact capability. If you want, you can also use channel 3 for private calls from trusted agents who know your private CTCSS, but then you lose out on all the Voice Alert activity. But remember to SAVE your config in a PM and with the channel A set to the APRS Voice Alert channel so that every time you start the car, you ARE on Voice Alert. You can also set in a few digital channels for local DX clusters if you like using your D7 or D700 for monitoring them. Then you can QSY at any time to a DXcluster frequency and receive DX spots too. APRS BUTTONS: Change the MENU RADIO-DISPLAY-KEY_FUNCTION to MODE3. This puts the front panel buttons into APRS function so you can quickly hit the LIST or MSG or BCON buttons. VOICE ALERT: This was why you left band A volume up but set CTCSS 100 to mute the speaker. This way, you dont hear any packets, but ANYONE can call you with VOICE on 144.39 to alert you by using PL 100. This allows anyone, anywhere, anytime (they are in simplex range of you) to call you by voice with PL100, because they KNOW you are listening on the APRS channel with CTCSS 100! PROXIMITY RADAR: A corrolary advantage of the Voice Alert Setting is that the speaker is 100% muted for all packets... EXCEPT simplex range packets from another Voice Alert D700 that is very close to you. His once a minute packets will act like a radar-ping, alerting you to his presence and the fact that he is also monitroing voice alert for a simplex QSO. You may go weeks without hearing anyone (simplex packet range is only 5 miles or so), but it is fun when someone comes in range. APRS is about *facilitating-communications*. With Voice Alert, you will never "pass-in-the-night" without knowing that someone is nearby, in simplex range of you that can ALWAYS be contacted with a voice call... Its like a free radar for other mobile APRS operators that are in simplex range AND listening. DIGIPEATING-MOBILE: We do not want mobiles to be digipeating most of the time. But we do want them available as backup digipeaters at all times. There are two methods for this. 1) It is OK to digipeat via any mobile by using his callsign explicitly. And 2) all D700's should be configured to support UITRACE TEMP so thta it can be used as a TEMPn-N digi at any time. See the special web pages all about D700 digipeater settings: http://aprs.org/TEMPn-N.html http://aprs.org/D7xx/d700digi.txt But basically it means: 1) Set UIDIGI to nothing! (we do NOT want you to be a generic digi!) 2) Set DIGIPEATER to ON (so we can at least digi via your callsign 2) Set UIFLOOD to nothing (so it is not used 3) Set UITRACE to TEMP so that your radio always supports TEMPn-N DIGIPEATING-FIXED: SOmepeople with spare D700's want to use them as permanent digipeaters. This is fine. It invovles using the serial port and setting: UIFLOOD SS,ID UITRACE WIDE Then saving that configuration in a PM so that it can be activated and de-activated in te field by chaing PM's. http://aprs.org/D7xx/d700digi.txt KEYBOARD TEXT MESSAGING: ------------------------ John Hansen has built an external interface box that allows the use of any PS-2 style keyboard as a message text entry device for the D700. It just plugs into the D700 mic jack and lets you send messages at normal typing speed. See http://www.coastalchip.com/Kenkey.htm OBJECTS and TRAFFIC REPORTING: ------------------------------ See also http://aprs.org/D7xx/d700-objects.txt This feature allows you to place TRAFFIC objects on the APRS system to alert other drivers of traffic porblems, slowdowns and or other incidents with only two button presses. This works by changing your MYCALL temporarily to TRAFFC (or other OBJECT name) and then sending a few packets to put it on the map. You put this cofig- uration in one of the radio's Program Memories (PM5) as follows: MYCALL: TRAFFC-4