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NWAPRS serves: Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, |
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CONFIGURING A TINYTRAK FOR OPERATION WITH APRS Open up the TT3 configuration program and enter your callsign or callsign with SSID... e.g. K5FSE-9 or whatever. Enter a path of WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1. The WIDE2-2 you mentioned isn't bad, but the one I suggested will allow you to take advantage of "home fill-in" digis as will as the real WIDEn-N digis. Select the proper symbol & overlay... e.g. > / for a car. The auto TX delay gives the transmitter time to key on and stabilize. You can probably set it down around 100-150 ms, but some experimentation may be required to find out how short a TX delay you can get away with. Too much TX delay is wasteful of airtime. I usually set a reasonable "auto transmit rate" but with SmartBeaconing enabled, you will be using those settings except for the "quiet time" setting. The default 500 ms is probably a good setting. You could enter some status text, but have it go out perhaps every 10 transmissions... e.g. TT3 (instead of the loner default "TinyTrak3") unless you want to put something else in there... e.g. "Jack 146.520" if you are listening on 652. You could enable "send altitude" if you want, but if someone is displaying your position on a topo map, it wouldn't really be necessary. Do NOT enable "send NMEA". Do select "only send valid". There's no real need to send a timestamp. You will of course be using 1200 bps if you are on 144.390, so don't select 300 baud. Enable MIC-E for drastically shorter transmissions. Select a suitable message such as "enroute" or whatever. Set path to conventional. Enable SmartBeaconing. Set the slow speed to perhaps 5 mph. Set the slow rate to 10 minutes or slower... e.g. 600 for every 10 minutes or 1200 for every 20 minutes. This will be your beacon rate when you are stationary or going less than 5 mph. Set the fast speed to 60 mph or whatever the usual highway speeds are where you will be traveling. Set the fast rate to perhaps every 1 to 3 minutes. The actual beacon rate will vary between the slow rate and the fast rate in relation to your actual travel speed. That should get you going. For longer trips, I would probably go to 3 minutes for the fast rate. If most are shorter trips, I would probably set it at 1 minute. As well as beaconing every e.g. 3 minutes, the corner pegging will also make it beacon when you turn a corner. Make sure you adjust R9 (receive sensitivity) so the TT3 knows when there is
a signal present and adjust the deviation with R6. If you don't have a deviation
meter, turn R6 up and force it to transmit. Keep turning it down until it sounds
quieter and then turn it down some more. This will get you in the ballpark for
about 3.5 KHz deviation. |