It was a very fun meeting - one of the people from this group made a presentation at my Emergency Communications group two weeks ago and it was a lot of fun. Came here tonight for the first time and struck the mother lode of radio geekness. They are working with APRS and proceeded to demo a couple of the modes of operation - you can send short emails, link it to a weather station for on-air weather conditions, tie in a GPS to do position tracking. Lots of stuff and the newer adapters are built around the Raspberry Pi so I already have a lot of familiarity with the platform.
There was a guy from the local SAR (Search and Rescue) who had some equipment of his own and who is building an amazing setup in his truck.
Here are a couple of links to the various bits of hardware and software demonstrated tonight: APRSDroid, Weather Monkey APRS, Mobilinkd TNC2, UDRC-II and Dire Wolf The thing that really gets me is that because all of the signal processing is now being done in software, the complex filter circuits are not needed and these units have much better performance but cost a fraction of what the old-school ones used to cost - $70 instead of $450.
Looks like there are now four meetings per month that I will be attending regularly.
Leave a comment