VX-8R & APRS questions

[KD8KSX]

Greetings! New to the site. I've been a HAM for a little less than a year and have had the HT for all of this time. Been nearly exclusively operating on 2m repeaters to pass the 1:30+ commute each way. I commute to the Northern VA area from Charles Town, WV.

This week I bought the gps module for the MH-74 handset and thought I'd give APRS a try. I followed the manual setting it up, as well as everything I could find on this site. It appears that my HT has succeeded in sending out a message at least once. But, I'd think that it would get out more than just once!

Anyway, here's a couple more specific questions.

1 - Months ago, I reprogrammed the internet key to display the battery status, following instructions on pg 121. How do I undo that so that it manually transmits my APRS beacon? I did turn the battery saver features back to OFF.

2 - I have it set to transmit every 1 minute (as I saw recommended here for lower power HTs to have a chance to get through now and then). But I don't seen the TX light on the B button light up, so I don't believe it's actually trying, even though the S-meter isn't indicating that squelch is broken. Also, the "A12" symbol is blinking continually.

3 - If I have 144.390 set in the B band, set on Auto tx, but I have the A band active to a repeater, would/should it tx my beacon anyway, or do I have to have the B band as the active band?

4 - I'm beginning to look around for a mobile unit to mount in my truck so that I don't have to swap out the HT and mag mount antenna every time I move from my car to the truck. I'm considering the FTM-350R since I primarily use 2m anyway, but at least at the moment, APRS doesn't seem to be terribly useful for me. Maybe I'll switch thinking to an FT-857D instead, so I can consider adding HF to my operational experience. I would, however, like to figure out "what's APRS good for" before I give up on it (I know that's very simplistic, but that is sort of a general question in a nutshell).

Thanks everyone!

Bruce

 

[djb_rh]

Not sure on 1, can look into that more later tonight.

On 2, what do you have APRS menu option 14 set to? Should be "Auto."

As for 3, yes, it will still auto-send even if you have A active on a repeater instead. Mine does, and thus if you are listening to someone talking, you WILL have their voice interrupted while the transmission goes out (ever so briefly).

As for the last thing, I have a 350R that I have yet to install, but I'm considering an 897D as a home rig that might occasionally go portable. If you want HF, can't go wrong with the 857 or 897, I don't think. If you want to use APRS, well, the 350R is the cats meow. I'm not sure it's really terribly *useful*, but my plan is to use my HT as my APRS beacon when I mountain bike in the middle of nowhere and the 350R to crossband repeat from the HT (I have both an 8R and an 8DR) when I'm not close enough to a digipeater for the HT to hit one.

Now I'm currently going a little nuts. I don't see how to set a GPS location into the P1-P9 memory slots so APRS will "lie." I can set the "manual" setting to whatever I want, but I see no way to store things in those P settings. And when I set something manually using my RT software, it doesn't "go" to the radio. Any other settings changes I mak are going, but not this. Hmmph.


--Donnie

 

[KD8KSX]

Thanks, Donnie! Yes, it's set on auto and in fact, I must have done something correctly as it finally got through and started txing packets about a third of the way home and kept it up the rest of the way. I had it muted but with the beeps on and it was beeping like crazy at first so I understand why it took a while to get the first one out.

Glad I found this forum. It seems more helpful than a couple others I used to frequent.

Bruce

 

[djb_rh]

Okay, glad it's working.

From what I can tell on your WiRES key, you shouldn't need to "set it back." When you're in one of the APRS screens, pressing that button *should* manually send your beacon. If you don't have GPS lock (or have a GPS position programmed with manual selected), it'll just beep at you when you try it.

There's no setting to make it send the beacon when in the VFO screen(s), I don't believe.

And yeah, this forum is good. I'm a relative newbie to the thing myself, though. But I've been digging at the radio really hard lately because I found some minor errors on the Nifty Mini-Manual for the 8R (which the author gladly corrected) and ended up working with him on the updated Mini-Manual for the 8DR.

The one feature the 350R has that the 8R and 8DR doesn't have that I *really* want is the ability to automatically publish the frequency of your OTHER VFO via the APRS message field. Gotta email Yaesu on that.


--Donnie