NWAPRS serves: Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories,
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana

APRS ON HF

Since the inception of APRS, there was a need to extend the range of trackers and stations so that others far across the country, or across the continent, would be able to see others on their maps. For the most park, HF APRS has dropped off because the VHF infrastructure has filled the void in most areas.

Since forever, the primary HF APRS frequency has been on 30 meters, at 10.151 LSB. For those w/o LSB on 30 meters, 10147.5 is about the same when USB is selected. There are other variances of this, described further on the http://www.findewe.com which are interactive wiki web pages.

Here are few other notes about operating APRS on HF:

For home stations, if you have a KAM+ or KAM XL, you can simultaneously operate HF and VHF on APRS. Some APRS applications work better than others. You can also become an hfGate station by setting MYGATE GATE.

ECHO is to HF, as WIDE1-1 is to VHF. However, you should not use ECHO in your outgoing path unless you have something really important or some type of emergency.

HF outgoing path should be GATE,WIDE1-1 or GATE,WIDE2-2.

HF baud rate is 300 baud. This is really slow, so keep this in mind when operating trackers on HF. Perhaps every 10 minutes is much better than every minute.

Who uses HF? Some home stations do, but it's really suited for mobile travelers who are outside of a local VHF RF infrstructure. There are still some maritime mobile HF APRS uses, but even so most of those folks are using WinLink2000 which has a GPS position link and all those positions are gated over to the APRS-IS.

There are other HF freqs available, including 7085 LSB, 10M, and 6M.