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Evening Fun!

petehowell

Well Known Member
Finally nice up here in the Hinterlands! I worked late, picked my son up from high school practice, ran him by subway for dinner, ran him over to summer ball practice, and then made tracks for the airport.

Preflighted the -9A, added 1/2 qt of oil, and started up, flipped on the Nav lights/APRS tracker, and taxied out.

kstp3rb0.jpg


Took off, headed southeast to downtown St. Paul(KSTP). It is a corporate airport, but the controllers love GA. They will often ask you to stay for a T&G or two when you fly-by. I made 3 sorta sloppy patterns, but 3 nice touch and goes. APRS won't let you lie about how good your patterns were :p

kstp1so1.jpg


On the way back to KANE, I circled my son and his team practicing ball below.

kstp2bq2.jpg


Landed, put the plane away, the picked up the boy at practice and headed home for Algebra and History homework help!! - It's good to be a dad......
 
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Tail number as call sign?

Pete, just curious about the use of your tail number as your transmitting call sign. I noticed both you and Sam Buchanan use your tail numbers instead of your FCC-issued call signs. I couldn't find any vanity call sign entries for you guys, so it has me wondering. Hopefully I just missed it or searched in the wrong place (although I'm not sure what's more definitive than the FCC's own site).

I can understand it's much more straightforward from our "aviation community" standpoint to remember your tail numbers, but I'm curious.

I'm not trying to be a pain in the a$$ here, I'm just wondering if it's legal.

Obviously I'd rather do the same, i.e. use my tail number instead of the less memorable KI6QBI, so I'm trying to figure out if I can do that without ramification!
 
Forgot to mention, I did see your call sign in your status text in the raw packets. Just wasn't sure if that's enough to make it legal.
 
Hey Sharpie

As I understand it, as long as I broadcast my call sign every 10 min, even if it is my comments, I am good to go. (My call sign goes out every 3 packets or every 3 minutes) The comments, as well as the beacon, are all in the same data stream, just in different places.

Hopefully Allen and Sam will weigh in here as well. Good to have you on board with APRS!
 
As I understand it, as long as I broadcast my call sign every 10 min, even if it is my comments, I am good to go. (My call sign goes out every 3 packets or every 3 minutes) The comments, as well as the beacon, are all in the same data stream, just in different places.

Hopefully Allen and Sam will weigh in here as well. Good to have you on board with APRS!

Same here (FCC call sign every four minutes or fourth packet, whichever occurs first). No reason why the tracker couldn't be configured to send the call sign every packet, I'm just trying to keep the packets as short as possible. It is my understanding that you can use whatever tactical call sign you wish for the tracker (Bus, Bike-1, balloon-43, Howdy Ya'll!, N399SB, etc) as long as the FCC call sign is transmitted at least once every ten minutes.

Last evening just for grins I hit the "APRS stations currently moving" link on the aprs.fi map page and found out we have another APRS brother flying an RV-6A in the Toledo area. Don't know if the pilot monitors this forum.....but I saw you in the traffic pattern!!! :D

Welcome to the APRS community, Dan!
 
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Call Signs

You may use any non-obscene Tactical Call sign in the "callsign" field. The law requires you to use your officially issued FCC call sign to identify your station, and this requirement is easily met by using your call sign in the Comment field. Like many APRS issues, this is one that surfaces from time to time on the boards, and results in lots of cyber blood-shed! The FCC enforcement people have been very clear that the standard practices used in APRS are permissable. Not to worry. Pete is 100% correct.

Allen
VHS
KG6HXO
 
Stopped clock..Twice a day?

Hey, this is more fun than the Hillary punchline game: "No, no, Mr. President, I said throw out the first PITCH!"

Allen
VHS
KG6HXO
Secretly afraid of small aircraft
 
Evening Fun - Me Too!

Yes I was out flying last night too.

I'm a certified gadget freak, when I saw your APRS posting I had to have one. I passed the Tech and General tests three weeks ago and I've had the MicroTrak-300 in 57TK for about two weeks now.

I flew from Toledo to the Oklahoma City area and back last week and it has worked great so far. I have a homemade 300-ohm twin-lead antenna taped inside the windshield, just in front of the rollbar (slider) and I'm really surprised how well it gets out with just 300mW.

I just got my homemade smoke system working about a month ago, so now everyone is asking me if I'm going to do skywriting. I tell them I'm going to practice APRS writing first. ;)

There is a small article about making your own smoke system in our April 2008 EAA 582 newsletter. http://www.eaa582.org/

And a short video of my plane at http://tinyurl.com/4do64d
 
Yes I was out flying last night too.

I'm a certified gadget freak, when I saw your APRS posting I had to have one. I passed the Tech and General tests three weeks ago and I've had the MicroTrak-300 in 57TK for about two weeks now.

I flew from Toledo to the Oklahoma City area and back last week and it has worked great so far. I have a homemade 300-ohm twin-lead antenna taped inside the windshield, just in front of the rollbar (slider) and I'm really surprised how well it gets out with just 300mW.

I just got my homemade smoke system working about a month ago, so now everyone is asking me if I'm going to do skywriting. I tell them I'm going to practice APRS writing first. ;)

There is a small article about making your own smoke system in our April 2008 EAA 582 newsletter. http://www.eaa582.org/

And a short video of my plane at http://tinyurl.com/4do64d

Yep, Tony, it was N57TK (also looked you up on the FAA database) I saw in the pattern at DUH but I wasn't going to "out" you unless you stepped forward. There is no hiding! :D

Glad to hear the tracker is working nicely for you. We would love to see the xcountry track you laid down and see what kind of digipeater coverage you got on the trip.

Update: Here is Tony's outbound trip:

http://aprs.fi/?call=N57TK&dt=1208649600&mt=m&z=8&timerange=3600

Looks like you had great coverage, especially in Oklahoma. There was one wiggle southeast of Fort Wayne, probably due to a misconfigured digipeater. I'm finding these blips can occur when someone isn't totally up to speed on setting up their repeater. Inaccurate position reports by a digi can cause the aprs.fi server to toss adjacent packets that don't fit into the speed/location limits.

Congratulations on knocking out the Tech and General in one sitting!
 
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The 'squiggle' was not a repeater anomaly, it was a change of plans to remain VFR.

On a different note, our chapter flew 96 Young Eagles this past Saturday at my home base (KDUH). The APRS was on for all 8 of my YE flights, including the smoke-on low pass with my daughter on board. The wind was gusting to 25 kts and we had a lot of kids to fly so the flights were a little shorter than normal. It doesn't help that 100LL is over $5.00 a gallon.

Here are the YE flight tracks http://aprs.fi/?call=N57TK&dt=1209168000&mt=m&z=11&timerange=3600

Still having fun with my T-Bird!
 
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