Iridium Sat tracking back from the Central Desert region

My vocation has many aspects to it, and one of them takes me to the Central Desert region about five times a year. My inReach Mini 2 beaconed every 20 minutes for the whole 880km tripback to Darwin. A long day! The inreach2aprs code running on a pi at home reliably posted the data from the Garmin feed to aprs.fi.

Click in image to enlarge.

30m APRS and Iridium Sat tracking, also to APRS

Well, today turned out to be a bit of a test run with 30m APRS using the IC-705, with the remote M2 Stack Bluetooth display (see a previous post) and an Argent Data OT2m. I also set up the inReach Mini 2 to report to APRS every 20 minutes using the inreach2aprs code which is running on a pi3(also see a previous post).

You can see the the display is showing 10.147.100 MHz, this is because the OT2m runs a 2100/2300 (Group E) frequency pairing. This is contrary to what is stated in the manual. It always pays to check these things.

If only the car could have behaved itself. I will take it to the car doctor and see what he says. It may actually be time to retire the X-Trail. Which will be sad as it has taken us on a lot of great adventures around this big island called Australia.

The Iridium network and APRS

A change in my work role means that I will be travelling our to remote communities regularly.  As a safety precaution the company require me to have some form of satellite communication. There were a couple of options that I was looking at, one being the Spot range and the other, the Garmin range.  I was aware that there was a way of getting the Spot beacons onto the APRS network, and so initially I was leaning towards the Sport X.  However I have owned a number of Garmin devices over the years and always found them to be well made.  

So, after much research I decided on a Garmin inReach Mini  2.  This devices used the Iridium satellite network.  The device itself is small yet can do so much. It will beacon its position at regular internals (10, 20 &30 min) and it also allows for unlimited 'check-in' messages and also two way text messaging.  It can be used stand alone, but is much easier to used when paired to a smart-phone via Bluetooth.

The inReach Mini 2 beside my ID-51A

 

It turns out that the guy who wrote the code for getting Spot beacons onto APRS has also written code for the Garmin inReach.  Enter Mark VK5QI.

Mark is a very active Amateur Radio enthusiast.  (And I suspect active in lots of other areas as well.) His website can be found HERE, this is more for getting an idea of the kind of things he get up too, but don't expect regular post. The last post is a couple of year old! However, he has written huge amounts of code, and this is where our paths have again crossed.  I say again because Mark helped me out years ago when I was registering my D-Star radio, and then again when I was playing around with tracking Weather Balloons. Anyway, it turns out that he is the author of some code called inreach2aprs (and also for that matter, spot2aprs).  The code can be found HERE.  

This code sends a queries (or request) to the Garmin website and received the position data, which it then processes and converts into an acceptable format for the APRS network.  Easy!

A simple bash script (sat2aprs.sh) is called via crontab at predefined intervals (in my case every 20 minutes).

sat2aprs.sh

#bin/bash

 

CALLSIGN=[callsign]

SSID=-[APRS SSID]

PASSCODE=[APRS Passcode]

MAPSHARE=https://share.garmin.com/Feed/Share/[add unique URL extension]

PASSWORD=[mapshare password, if used]

 

cd /home/pi/inreach2aprs/

 

python inreach2aprs.py --mapshare_url=$MAPSHARE --mapshare_password=$PASSWORD  --comment="Via Iridium & inReach2aprs" $CALLSIGN $SSID $PASSCODE

 

 

The line in crontab looks like this:-

*/20 * * * * /home/pi/sat2aprs.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

If you want to change the APRS symbol this need to in modified the inreach2aprs.py program itself.

Thanks to Mark VK5QI for his assistance is getting me up and running.

HAB and WSPR

HAB stands for a High Altitude Balloon. Amateurs send these up at regular intervals. A growing number manager to circumnavigation the globe, not just once but multiple times.  A few years ago I used to receive signals from them when they were using JT9 on 30m. A few days ago I noticed a balloon about 3000km to the west, using the 'amateur.sondehub.org' website.  And so I undertook some research. It turns out that this particular one was using 20m WSPR, Beaconing every 10 minutes for two consecutive cycles.  The first is in a standard format but the second two minute segment is modified to send GPS status, altitude, speed, temperature and battery voltage.

I tuned to 20m and set WSJT-X  to WSPR mode. And before long I was receiving VE3OCL. (Click on the Callsign to open the Amateur Sondehub site.) You may have decoded a HAB without even knowing as they just show up on WSJT-X looking like a normal station. 

This particular one seems to be using the U4B - Balloon tracker, made by QRP Labs. Not bad for a massive 1.8g!

There is always something more to explore with Amateur Radio.

 

Links:-

 

http://lu7aa.org/wsprx.asp?other=ve3ocl&launch=20230402124700&SSID=34&banda=20m&balloonid=04&timeslot=2&tracker=qrplabs 

https://amateur.sondehub.org/#!mt=Mapnik&mz=5&qm=1d&mc=-11.3508,116.85059&f=VE3OCL-34

 

https://aprs.fi/#!call=a%2FVE3OCL-34&timerange=604800&tail=604800

 

DXCC Achieved!

Well, it has been a long time coming but tonight we achieved our 100th contact from the balcony.  The last 5 countries were, Mexico, South Africa, Belize, Cuba and Canada.

There was a little drama, as I updated JTAlert and for some reason it stopped logging contacts to Winlog32 (heart-rate raised just a little).  On reading the help file a solution was found.  Yes, I know reading the help file is cheating! 

Nonetheless, we are there, at least with Digital. CW and Voice, I guess are the next challenges.

There may need to be some antenna work required. Yes, in that regard I'm the eternal procrastinator!