Have been trying to send a blog post via APRS since yesterday morning but found that packets sent to APRSLink are accepted/ACK’ed until I send the /EX command then the message fails with an “Error Sending Message” message. This is why I try to at least send a test post every so often. Tried again this morning with no luck but this afternoon saw a post on the APRS Yahoo Group from someone having the same issue, so that at least puts my mind at ease not thinking it was my setup. It was a little tricky at first getting this setup, mainly because I had to whitelist on Winlink side as well as add my Winlink email address as an authorized email on Posterous. But sending from the Webmail directly from the site showed me this was not the problem and the problem lies with the APRS part of the path/link. Waiting to get approved for the Winlink Yahoo Group to inquire about this issue.
Now that I have been firmly bitten by the APRS/ISS bug my mind if now thinking of other things like is there a reverse path to working the ISS? Of course the excitement is in working the ISS (or any SAT for that matter) directly as it passes overhead but is there in place a way to send an APRS message through the terrestrial APRS Network to a SatGate that has both connected during a pass to allow those out of line of site of the pass or maybe just for some killer APRS DX? Or is getting to findu.com as far as it is going to get? This is just me brainstorming since I am still getting the “feel” of this and now the “experimenter” is coming out. So I did try a little experiment this morning. Since work demands were not going to allow me a little APRS/ISS play time on this mornings pass I setup my HT ahead of time with a 30 second beacon rate so at least during the pass I should hopefully get a position report in. Then as part of my little experiment I setup APRS+SA connected via TCP/IP on the laptop with a reverse path of that on the HT. Once the pass started I remote logged into the laptop via my Blackberry using RDM+ and clicked send on the already queued up test APRS message. So once I got back to the office from my meeting I checked the HT but nothing was received but saw on findu.com that I did get my position beacon in during the pass. Again, this is just me brainstorming/experimenting, just need to do a little more reading and research about this (open TDM slots permitting) to see if this is even possible and if it is how to make it work. And speaking of work guess I better get back to work, so that is all for now. Until next time….73s!