FW: 6 meter APRS or meteorscater?

[Robert Bruninga]

Would this be a great NEW mission for some of these 6m 100W
radios?

Meteorscatter email from devistated areas on 51.63 MHz.

This is now trivial to set up with APRS.  All we do is have
these radios scattered around the country and hooked to a TNC
and the home PC runing any Igate software.  Done.  24/7
Monitoring for Email.

First responders in a blacked out area collect outgoing Emails
from senders as needed and put them in a continuous TX queue
using the normal 15 second
cycle times.  Since Meteor scatter is a continuous statistical
process, then as long as the outgoing message has been in the TX
queue for X minutes, then there is a 99% probability that it was
received and injected into the internet.  Sent, Done.

We can experiment to find out what X is.  And there will be two
values of X.  One for use with a 2 dBi gain vertical and another
with say a small beam.  Of course using 9600 baud would GREATLY
improve throughput but also GREATLY restrict the number of
players.  In my mind, since this is a rarely used potential, it
is better to have higher participation than optimum speed.

Thus, lets just use 1200 baud.  And see how well it works.
Anyone with 6m FM rigs want to try it out?

Best target date for a test will be the upcoming quandritids on
4 January.  Of course, meteor scatter works every day 24/7 and
the only reason for choosing a meteor shower is just to make it
more fun.

I remember we did APRS MS many years ago (1995) (APRSdos has a
built-in Meteor Scatter mode) but none of the follow on clones
implemented it so again, it is another APRS function lost to
one-way vehicle tracking..  Here are the results back then:

http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/meteors.html

Bob, WB4APR


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Bruninga [mailto:bruninga at usna.edu] 
> Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 11:42 PM
> To: bruninga at usna.edu; TAPR APRS Mailing List
> Subject: 6 meter APRS or meteorscater?
> 
> Can someone summarize meteorscatter packet experiments on 6
meters?
> 
> A sparkplug in our local ham club is putting together a group 
> of many 100W 6 meter rigs and the only thing I can think of 
> that would be interesting is to set one up on a 6 meter APRS 
> DX channel to see what gets through on 6 meter MS.
> 
> Is there a beacon-net frequency already functional there?
> 
> ANy other great ideas for 6 meter applications other than 
> just FM talk?  So many radios, so little time...
> 
> WB4APR
>