I got the phone call on March 28th from Ham Radio Outlet in Sunnyvale that my radio was back from repair from Kenwood. Having experienced a bit of “radio withdrawl” even though I don’t talk a lot on it, I ran right over there on my lunch break. Picked up the radio, plugged in my programming cable in the car, and got all of the frequencies restored with no problems. Nice to have everything back to normal!

The other interesting news was that Mark Bronson (KI6FEA) and I finally made contact via radio. He’s over in the San Jose/Alviso area, and we met up on the K6FB Castle Rock repeater late one evening. Hopefully that encourages him in to the hobby at least a bit :-) Then after church we talked via simplex on our way to lunch and then over to his house.

We talked a lot more about APRS tracking for our aircraft that afternoon, and I’m putting together some of my thoughts on the options available to us regarding that shortly. Primarily I’m going to compare the options of the RPC-Electronics RTrack, Byonics TinyTrak3Plus, Byonics MicroTrack, or just using the Kenwood TH-D7 with an external GPS.

My goals are for something small, easy to set up, low power consumption, fewer wires the better, low cost, and to adjust it’s beaconing rate depending on speed if possible.  I’ll review the listed trackers above, look for others, and report back on which one I’ll probably end up buying. I’ll be sure to refer to this page to see which ones look the most interesting ones to take a deeper look at.