Do any of you guys that are buying the latest and greatest APRS, have a Micro-trak 300 that you might want to get rid of? The reason I ask is, I have a J-3 Cub on floats that I fly, and it doesn't have an electrical system. According to the Micro-Trak 300 manual, the 300 and the GPS will run on a 9 volt battery. That would work great in the Cub.
My e-mail address is mtamm at screenworksinc.net
Thanks
Mike T.
(Actually, when I ordered my MT-RTG, I didn't realize that; but I emailed Byonics later and Byon sent me the right chip at no charge. Great service, but save yourself some time, do what VHS says and specify the dual speed chip when you order. There's a different TinyTrak3Config utility for the dual speed chip too, if you want to do your own configuration... Byon can point you to the URL to download that.)... Byonics has a chip that can accept 4800 or 9600 baud input... If/whn you order one, just make sure that we send you the dual baud rate chip.
Are many folks using either of those antennas in an aircraft? I would guess they wouldn't work very well, but I could be wrong. As for reviewing costs for a SiRFstar III GPS receiver, www.argentdata.com seems to have slightly better prices.I think that a review of the costs and features will lead most to choose the Byonics GPS that is bundled with the RTG (along with an antenna, rubber duck or magmount)
I was worried about that with the MT-RTG, seeing as it's housed in a nonconductive plastic box. No problem with the present installation here, though I have a ferrite choke balun on my antenna which might be helping with that.having a standalone system it seems to me at least, is much less likely to introduce RF noise from the tracker into your other avionics.
Everybody's avionics setup is going to be different, but if you have one or more NMEA GPS data busses already, and they're accessible, tapping one for APRS might be easier than having to think about mounting another antenna and routing its cable. In my case I already had a serial line run anticipating a 406 MHz ELT install which hasn't materialized, so it was really easy to repurpose that.I like the spirit you showed in tapping your GPS display unit, but the hockey puck is so simple and so cheap, that the cost/benefit of building and running a cable from your display GPS seems extravagant.
You want extravagant, I'll tell you about feeding the left gear leg in our RV-6 as a nonresonant folded monopole, with a L-C network matching it to 50 ohms at 145MHz. Works great for APRS!( In truth, much of what you guys do seems extravagant to my bailing wire/bubble gum engineering mindset!)
Are many folks using either of those antennas in an aircraft? I would guess they wouldn't work very well, but I could be wrong. As for reviewing costs for a SiRFstar III GPS receiver, www.argentdata.com seems to have slightly better prices.
I was worried about that with the MT-RTG, seeing as it's housed in a nonconductive plastic box. No problem with the present installation here, though I have a ferrite choke balun on my antenna which might be helping with that.
Everybody's avionics setup is going to be different, but if you have one or more NMEA GPS data busses already, and they're accessible, tapping one for APRS might be easier than having to think about mounting another antenna and routing its cable. In my case I already had a serial line run anticipating a 406 MHz ELT install which hasn't materialized, so it was really easy to repurpose that.
Also, there are reports of a dedicated APRS puck interfering with XM Weather, so going that way isn't necessarily a free lunch either.
You want extravagant, I'll tell you about feeding the left gear leg in our RV-6 as a nonresonant folded monopole, with a L-C network matching it to 50 ohms at 145MHz. Works great for APRS!
--Paul
Here is the link to yesterdays flight http://aprs.fi/?call=N42AH&dt=1275955200&mt=m&z=11&timerange=3600