GAISS progress.

I’ve mentioned before the GAISS project (here and here). It wasn’t in the original plan, but we are now receiving the MAP27 information from the ‘base’ radio, and making them available for a small conversion appplication that re-transmits them on the National APRS frequency of 144.800Mhz. This allows us to leverage the already existing APRS infrastructure in place to get our ‘position packets’ to go around corners where there is no existing RF path.

Our GAISS GUI will then be able to pluck the relevant data from the APRS data stream and plot the positions of the SEMRA personnel that are out walking for the event. Delighted as we are to have this much working (and that we will have something to show at the Galtee Walking Festival), we are still a long way of a ‘finished’ prototype.

SEMRA Positions

Dxtuners no more.

Dxtuners has closed. I had gotten used to using it when travelling to keep an eye on things ‘back home’.

Last weekend I came across this post by Steve Haigh. His updated version of pcrd compiled fine on my ubuntu machine (though I did fix one small mistake).

That got me thinking, so I asked a few ‘geeks’ in work for solutions. It was suggested that controlling it over IRC would be the fastest way of doing it requiring mimimum effort on my part.

Well I think they were right, all of about 8 lines of tcl and its working again. Log in to #frequencydb on zirc and say hello.

Busy Busy Busy.

Mad busy at the moment, I keep forgetting to post and I keep forgetting to practice Morse (6’s B’s & J’s still bothering me).

We have two weeks to go before our “Field Trial” of the GAISS project. The Field trial is going to be over the weekend of the Galtee Walking Festival, the 2nd and 3rd of June. As well as trying to make sure GAISS works for the weekend, I’m also organising AREN and TARG’s involvement in providing communications for each walk for the weekend. We are still looking for licensed experimenters (Radio Hams) to help out on the weekend.

In GAISS, at this stage we are able to extract GPS information from the Simoco Radio’s. Though we haven’t managed to display one in our GUI yet. Our initial plans for a WiFi link from our receive site back to ‘Base’ were scuppered by unhelpful terrain. Plan b is to turn the received MAP27 GPS information packets into APRS packets, which we can then re-transmit over the existing APRS network.

Kristian and I are in the middle of doing our SRC Modules 1 and 2 ( Which will come in useful, should I ever find the time to get back into An Seabhac Mara), as we need them to operate at the Field Trial.

Pressure is on!