I've been driving around experimenting with the effectiveness of the APRS functionality of the VX-8r. I also took it with me this last weekend on a weekend hunting trip to the Mojave Preserve.
For the most part it works as advertised. However, 5 watts out of a duckie antenna does limit your ability to effectively transmit messages and to be tracked.
Digi Path settings
The APRS settings menu has a setting called
Digi Path. Without going to all the details (a good resource is here:
Southern California APRS Guidelines), this setting determines how many hops your beacon or message will be allowed to take which can make the difference of being "heard" or not. The way that Yaesu implements this is by putting entries into the Digi Path setting. They take effect in the order you put them in, i.e. 1., 2., 3., etc. It makes sense once you get into the menu. The default from Yaesu is 1. Wide1-1, 2. Wide2-1. After a little research, I decided that it would be much better to change 2. to Wide2-2.
The VX-8r will not transmit a beacon or attempt to send a message while it is receiving APRS traffic. That makes perfect sense. One thing I noticed however, is that the VFO B (the one you must use for APRS)receiver picks up engine noise from my Jeep. The result is that it opens the squelch and you hear steady static. Incidentally, I didn't get this behaviour in the RV over the weekend. As a result, the radio never beacons while driving around in the Jeep. To get around this problem, I just activate the antenna attenuator (Setup Menu 3.) when driving. Now it doesn't pick up the engine noise at all and beacons just fine. Since I have another radio in the Jeep anyway, the
HT is there really just for APRS use.
Linear Mode
