I've been playing around with APRS again and notices some new(ish) software called PinPoint. It is a windows based package that is very tidy in appearance and easy to setup. It will even act as an iGate! I haven't heard of anyone using it in VK but thought it was worth a try, so try I did. It all seemed to work well but it reported the beacon from my TH-D72 incorrectly, placing my position north by almost a degree. (And when you live in Darwin this is even more noticeable.)
After going through all the possibilities I came to the conclusion that there was a bug in the software, and given that it was developed (and in use) in the northern hemisphere without issue, I surmised that it may only be a problem that shows itself south of the equator. Therefore I decided to write to the developer, Frank AB0WV.
After a couple of emails in which additional information was shared, I received the following reply: -
Hi Mal,
Nice work! Your instinct was correct. This only happens on the southern hemisphere. I convert the raw latitude data into the desired display format in the code (degrees & decimal minutes, degrees, minutes and seconds, etc) and was not bringing the negative sign (for southern hemisphere latitude) across in my conversion for the fractional part (the section after the whole degrees), so, the fractional part was subtracted from (rather than added to) the whole degrees after the conversion of degrees, and the fractional part separately. Hope that makes sense. Once I added that in, it worked fine.
Nice find! Thank you!
A fix has been made and is now available on his site.
There are a lot of very generous hams like Frank around that share their efforts (software etc) with us and it's great to have assisted in some small way.
