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Fridays trip out was one of those moments that should be best left in the back of your mind. I had decided to activate Burnbank Fell, Blake Fell and Gavel Fell. All of these are close to home and there is a fell race on Blake fell once a year which I might do one day. I parked up where I thought I was going to start, Lamplugh Green, only to find the path scattered with ‘no access to open fell’ signs all over the place. Ah! this could be bad. I knew there was access onto the fells from another angle via Fangs Brow so scuttled off over there and parked up. Unfortunately my map had detail of where I wanted to go from but not where I was actually going from so there was a bit of detail missing. Suffice to say that in my hast to reach burnbank I walked right past it and had to get Colin, 2E0XSD to give me the benefit of his previous knowledge and APRS to tell me that that rusty metal post in the corner of the fenced area next to a sorry pile of stones was the summit. As I was closer to Blake Fell I went up there, activated that from the comfort of the circle of stones and then onto Gavel before coming back for Burnbank. So a successful outing but one which wasn’t helped by a lack of access, missing bit of map and not putting the fell in as an object in my rig. Still as mark, MM1MPB reminded me sending ?WOTA to QRU would give me the closest fell. Time to programme that as a standard message as well.

I took my vx8 with me today down to derbyshire. This inevitably hits the m6 from my qth. After a couple of stops for some QSO’s with SOTA activators I ended up turning the aprs off. Why? Because there was so much activity going down the road it became a distraction.

I never thought I’d be in a position where there was so many barrrps and dings as beacons we sent and received. What a brilliant system and what a god send having the off button. Now the only other thing I could think of whilst spending 4 hours in the road was a ‘follow me auto tuning repeater function’ that automatically tunes to repeaters in range on any band. Not sure if I have the acumen to execute this idea (unless its been done already)

Now that christmas is approaching it was time to make the trip slightly further north to visit the xyl’s family home in Troon. naturally I would go with a rig of some description and I managed to slip a magmount and a 2m/70cm whip on the car and my sota MFD in the boot whilst the rest of the family were distracted with the fresh snow. It took a few miles up the M74 before I was busted and out of APRS range from the local stations. Good thing was that with this antenna and a measly 5w I was gated up until just before Dumfries. Bad news was that that was it and APrs.fi noted there wasn’t another iGate anywhere near the rest of the journey.

What’s all this got to do with reapeaters? Well thinking about this gave me the thought that if the repeaters had an iGate then chances are most of the country would have good coverage. I wonder if this has ever been thought of before? It would certainly add another avenue to APRS and open up the network to more than just the useful volunteers that kind gate me (G4PEW, 2E0XSD, G4ILO, G8WVW, MM1BHO & MM1MPB

The other nice thing was that with my measly 5w and the rubber duck I can just about get access to GB3AY from the house so I at least have an avenue to play with over christmas. I wonder if the mother in law would mind a beam in her back garden…hmmm thought not. Still nice to be able to get into a repeater when away from the house

This evening whilst the XYL is out and about I thought I’d try and follow something that Julian, G4ILO had done with a software tnc call APRS-SCS connected up to APRSIS. His original post is here and gives all the right places to go to get the software. Well getting the software is the easy part, getting APRS-SCS to decode the few packets I heard locally is ok. APRSIS32 displays the packets. But can I get APRSIS to transmit through APRS-SCS (Too many APRS’s here I think)? Not yet. This is going to work if it’s the last thing I do before I go to bed early in a sulk