warning: possibly a commercial
AllisonHouse now has APRS position tracking for users of GRLevel3. You can overlay the persons current position within the radar screen. Helps with nowcasting and spotter coordination. This was specifically requested by the Indianapolis NWS office as part of their storm spotter coordination efforts.
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I'm currently working with a storm chasing team (not sure if they want me to say who so I'll leave that until later) to figure out how to get position reports of their vehicles back to a nowcaster at their forecasting headquarters.
I queried the APRS gurus on the aprsig mailing list and found out the following information about the typical "storm chasing" areas in the middle of the US:
information is dated as of late Sep 2005
If running a 50 watt radio with a good antenna and a path of
'WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2' the following *should* hold true.
- All major highways are covered as are most major cities.
- APRS coverage in Colorado dies about 60 miles east of the front range of
the Rocky Mountains until you hit Kansas.
- Kansas has near full coverage
- Nebraska has near full coverage
- Iowa has near full coverage
- Wisconsin has near full coverage
- Minnesota has near full coverage except in the north
- Missouri has almost nothing except on major roads/cities
- South Dakota has almost nothing except on major roads/cities
One thing I didn't think of is you can run APRS on 30m with an HF rig and
a Hamstick using the same tracker/gps configuration you would have used
for VHF. That would nearly garuntee a connection as it would cover
thousands of miles. The Byonics/TinyTracker supports 300baud HF. I don't
have a license for HF though so I can't help with that.
Even with the fairly good coverage listed above you are garunteed to be in an area that simply isn't covered (even in the states that claim full coverage).
For the chase team they are looking into Satellite tracking (think Semi truck) instead since they think it will cost about $70 bucks a month. It's worth it to them to have 24x7 coverage instead of the "on the cheap...might work" APRS network.
Nothing wrong with APRS tracking..I'll be playing with one in 2006.