I've been messing around with A.P.R.S. for about 4 years now. For the
first two years I had a very crude setup which included a Kantronics
KPC-3 tie-wrapped to the top of my Yaesu 2500 radio, and a Garmin 3
fastened to my car dash with Velcro. But hey it worked!
One of the main uses of my
A.P.R.S. gear initially was to help support the
Tournament Of Roses
parade in Pasadena on New Year's Eve by following parade floats on their
journey from the construction area to the parade formation area. The
A.P.R.S. tracking data is provided by the
TORRA (Tournament Of Roses
Radio Amateurs) and used by parade officials to better coordinate
the arrival of floats to the staging area.
The past two years I have in addition
been helping with the "Baker To
Vegas" race, which is an annual marathon foot race of police
officers to raise funds for charities. The A.P.R.S. data in this case is
used by each team to follow the position of their runners to better
judge when they need to be out on the course ready to run. It's a 120
mile, 18 hour race, with 20 runners on each team, who don't like to
stand around in freezing cold desert temperatures at night any longer
than they need to.
This new activity required me to
first, semi-permanently mount my gear inside of some sort of a box, so I
could secondly, move my A.P.R.S. radio gear to our city's race vehicle
which follows the runners during the race.
Last year I mounted my gear into a
plastic toolbox with the same Kantronics TNC strapped to the top of my
radio, and my Garmin 3 GPS mounted to a metal bracket. One problem was
the GPS, which requires the manual push of its power button to fire it
back up, in the event of a lengthy power disruption and the internal AA
batteries fail. The second problem was with the KPC-3 and how its
memory buffers would get full at the most inconvenient times and repeat
the same position data over and over until a clear buffer command was
issued. I will say that after I upgraded to the 8.3 version firmware,
which allowed a new "clear" command, the buffer overflow problem went
away.
I wanted something a little more
bullet proof, or idiot proof maybe is a better term. That's when I heard
about the Tiny Trak 2 and decided to get it a try. I got it put together
and working but had problems with it going into wild oscillations after
a few minutes of operation. So I went back to the time proven
combination of the Garmin and KPC-3. Earlier this year when the Tiny
Trak 3 came out I went ahead and got the new board so I could give it
another try. I have a friend, Kim KA1WCC, who is like
Zorro with his soldering iron so I took my TT3 over to his
house for final wiring, which only required bribing him with a few
dinners on me. It's amazing to watch him with a Weller in one hand and
wire snipers in the other, he just simply, "knows his stuff."
Along with the Tiny Trak 3 I
purchased a generic GPS engine on eBay from KD5DHU 18 months ago for
$44.95. As Kim and I were going along and wiring up this newest A.P.R.S.
Tracker he suggested we put a DB-9 connector on the gps case and simply
plug it straight into the Tiny Trak 3. Wow, simplicity at its best! The
gps required 5v so we wired up a regulator on top of the gps case onto a
heat sink. It does get slightly warm! We also wired up a programming
cable and ran the Tiny Trak 3 configuration utility to set up the
operation parameters. Worked flawlessly first time. Neat!
Anyway, on to the pictures of the
Tiny Trak 3 which turned out real well. Thanks Kim for your help!
