It’s SOARAs 50th Anniversary and I wanted to send out a Beacon on APRS to let folks know about our special operating event at Gilleran Park in Mission Viejo on May 18th and 19th, 2024. There are many ways to do this and I chose to use a Kantronics KPC3+ TNC and handie-talkie.
Most TNCs have the ability to send beacons (BTEXT) in a UI frame that APRS enabled devices can decipher and display. I configured the BTEXT field to send out a packet that contains a fixed station location, Power, Height, Gain, and Directivity information and a text message as follows:
| BTEXT !3336.00N/11738.13W.PHG2140 www.soara.org SOARA 50th Anniversary Event May 18th & 19th Gilleran Park |
3336.00N/11738.13W are the coordinates for Gilleran Park in Mission Viejo.
PHG2140 denotes the following:
| Power = 2 (4 watts or 22), Height = 1 (20 feet), Gain = 4 (4dB), Directivity = 0 (omnidirectional) |
The period (.) between the West indicator and P (for Power) configures the symbol/icon that’s used to display the position report. The slash (/) between Longitude and Latitude defines the primary symbol set be used. A backslash (\) would cause the secondary set to be used.
To configure the PATH for the beacon, I used the following UNPROTO directive with a TOCALL of “APN382” and VIA of “WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1”
| UNPROTO APN382 VIA WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 |
APN382 defines the type of device to be a Kantronics KPC-3 TNC running firmware version 3.82. TOCALLs can be found in the table here: http://www.aprs.org/aprs11/tocalls.tx
The complete APRS reference can be found here: http://www.aprs.org/doc/APRS101.PDF
Here is what the beacon looks like on the Yaesu FTM-350 and Kenwood D710:
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