[drats_users] Why GPS over GPS-A

[Gerard Hickey]

On Apr 12, 2010, at 1:48 PM, John Davis wrote:

> Last week, we were preparing for an 84 mile MS Bike Ride and were using D-STAR 2820 radios in the SAG vans.  When transmitting GPS format, it did not report to APRS sites.  When using GPS-A, it did not map on D-RATS.  Any thoughts?  We will do some more testing this week.

On a recent trip from Seattle to the California Bay area, I attempted to get my IC-2820 to report my position. I believe that I did GPS down to California and GPS-A back up to Seattle with no success. I found a few things online that gave me enough info that I have since added an eight character for my call on all my radios (M for mobile and P for portable). Ideally I should have been able to find WT0F-M on the APRS servers, but no joy. 

To the best of my understanding, the gateway administrator has to setup a script to catch the GPS beacons and report them to the APRS-IS servers. I just figured that most of the gateways were not configured to do so. It would be nice if I were just doing something wrong.
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Gerard Hickey / WT0F
hickey at kinetic-compute.com
425-395-4554