Prep Comms - APRS: ALL About It! A HR360 Replay pt.1

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

The listeners have spoken—so I’m breaking my own rules and releasing this episode out of sequence. I’ve been getting a lot of APRS questions lately, and instead of trying to answer them all on Instagram or Facebook, I figured it was time to bring this one back. This is a replay from the HamRadio 360 podcast, where I sat down with Kenneth W6KWF to talk about APRS—an old-school messaging system that works without any infrastructure. No cell towers, no Wi-Fi. Just radios doing what radios do best. It’s simple, powerful, and way too overlooked. If you’re into emergency comms or prepping, APRS should be on your radar. Honestly, it’s worth getting your ham license for this feature alone. Enjoy the throwback—and check out more at prepcomms.com or dig through the full archive at hamradio360.com. .

Hey, welcome into the Prepcom's podcast. I'm Caleb Nelson, your host, K4CDN, and I am breaking my own rules. My rules were I was not going to talk about anything else on this show until I had gone through all of the different modes and methods and all of that stuff that we've been building through this last couple of however long of episodes, trying to build like a library of, um, just understanding for you, the listener, but my Instagram feed tells me that I have to stop that right now and insert this. And what we're going to talk about, honestly, I'm going to introduce it and then I'm going

to play something for you because years ago, back in 2016, 2017, I was hosting a podcast, which was insanely popular. Yes, I'm blowing my own horn. It was really a great show by the way. It was called Ham Radio 360. It didn't start out Ham Radio 360, but that's what it finished as. And at one point I was actually on Twitter one day,

I could not figure out this digital mode called APRS. That's the Automatic Packet Reporting System. It doesn't have anything to do with GPS, although it can be used as a tracker. Okay. Get that out of the way. And I'll play this episode for you in a few minutes so you can learn all you need to learn. All right.

Uh, but I've actually got two episodes and I'm going to introduce the first one here. And then you can listen to my conversation with a guy named Kenneth back in the day. And then there'll be a follow-up episode where we do like a question and answer. It's a much longer show, but there were a lot of questions and there's a lot of information that's in these programs that you just can't explain through a Instagram story or even an Instagram post where you've got a carousel.

Those recently, those posts have done very well and you guys are very interested in this, like you should be. It is one of the most ignored yet most powerful tools for a prepper, especially if they're an amateur radio operator to utilize because in its purest form, now with my understanding here in 2025, this is point to point messaging without any zero connectivity.

If my station can hear your station or your station can hear my station, then we can message back and forth. That means if the telephone networks, internet networks, Starlink, whatever quits, if you've got a 12 volt battery and a radio and an antenna connected to a smartphone or even an old laptop, you and I can connect. Okay. Now we may not be able to connect for a thousand miles, but we can connect locally and that's why APRS in my personal opinion is the dark horse of

amateur radio messaging. It's not what you see the guys doing necessarily from their backpack radios on YouTube, um, where they're going out and they're sending messages for 600 miles. That's a completely different thing, but it's the same premise, but it's not what we're talking about here. All right. This is more of a localized means of connectivity between you and your neighbors in your county or maybe a couple of counties separated, maybe even across the state lines.

Okay. or maybe a couple of counties separated, maybe even across the state lines. Okay, it's all done with VHF radio. And this is a tool for amateur radio operators, which means at the very least, they studied about two and a half days, took a 35 question test, and now have the ability to do this and all kinds of cool stuff. All right, gonna leave that right there.

We'll get back to that later, I'm sure down the road. So I'm gonna stop here. I'm going to start playing an interview from me from 2016, 2017, and we'll play it out through and you guys can do with it what you like. I really hope that it inspires you to learn more. The second episode, the follow-up, will release later and it will answer a lot of the questions

you probably have. In the meantime, if you're listening and you like it, let me know on Instagram. That's really where I'm at the most. We have a private Facebook group. I am on Facebook, but Instagram is really what's happening right now for me. So thank you for listening.

I'll probably outro this show, but either way, I know I've taken a long time. What is this, four minutes? Oh my gosh. Who takes that long to introduce something? I covered my mouth because I won't answer that question on the air. Thank you for listening.

I hope you enjoy this. I hope you learned something from it. And if you have questions, find me on Instagram at prep comms. 73 y'all. But anyway, a few months ago, I was tweeting about, uh, or lamenting on Twitter about my, my lack of success with APRS. And, and there was a guy who came in and was asking, well, what's the problem?

What are you doing wrong? Of course, because it is, and it was me. Yeah. It was a at K W FF is Kenneth Finnegan. And, uh, we kind of talked a little bit offline about what was going on. And then, uh, he said, Hey, can I, can I just help you? Can you call me on the phone? And I said, sure.

He gave me his phone number. I called him one evening, like two hours later. I asked him, I said, can I, can I have you come on the show and help me help my audience understand this APRS thing? And he said, sure. So back before Christmas we got together, I've been sitting on this one for a while. We had the Winterfield Day show, we had the Napoto follow-up, but I did not want to let us get too far into the new year without this one.

So Kenneth, thank you very much again for coming in. Um, Kenneth has helped me off the show, uh, spend some time with me, helping me learn about APRS and at that point, about four minutes into that conversation, I immediately knew that we needed to have this guy on the show to talk to us about APRS. We have had so many questions raised over the last three years about what is APRS? What will APRS do for me? Why do I want APRS? Is it just a GPS tracking device? Blah blah blah. We've had them and all and we've tried to answer them but the fact of the matter is it still seems to be

a very complicated thing out there in the ham universe but really it's not and the more I'm learning about it the more I'm understanding that it's really not that complicated. And in large part, thanks to folks like Kenneth who has come along and said, hey, let me help you with this. And so, Kenneth, we wanna again, welcome you into the Hand Radio 360 podcast

and look forward to learning from you this morning. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Kel. Absolutely, man. Guys, Kenneth's called us Whiskey Six, Kilo Whiskey Fox, and he resides out in Sunnyvale, California. He knows Ed Fong and he knows some of the guys of the Baynet group. He actually heard about the 360 podcast at Pacificon. Can you kind of give us just an idea about what Pacificon really is for people that have never got to attend that event? Yeah, sure.

So Pacificon is kind of one of the West Coast Division amateur radio conferences and so we set up out in the West Coast Division amateur radio conferences. And so we set up out in the East Coast and it's got several lecture tracks as well as there's a full day ham cram session, there's test sessions, vendor booths, kind of your typical, I would say it's like one or two notches above your typical kind of ham fest sort of flea market thing. above your typical kind of ham fest sort Oh yeah, so I actually spoke at it this year. So I gave a one-hour lecture on the communications network that I deploy for the Wildflower Triathlon.

So I talked about spitting up about half a dozen UHF repeaters. Which I've seen one of the videos about that and we're going to link that in our show notes, Kenneth, because that's a very intriguing, actually that's what got me pushed further toward Kenneth when I was looking for some help on APRS. He makes it sound really easy. And beyond that, the scope of work you guys do for that particular event is amazing. And I'm just going to encourage folks to watch the video. It'll be in the show notes and you guys really need to check it out. There's a lot of great information there. And not

to mention that Kenneth has over 200 YouTube videos as well on his channel. I don't think I have that many. I think I only have a hundred and change. Okay. Okay. I'm sorry. I misspoke a few over a hundred. Okay.

So, Hey, maybe he'll have 200 this time next year. Yeah. He's, he's, we can, we can only hope. Yeah. We can only hope. Yeah. So what we're here to chat about this time through is APRS and you know, a lot of people right off the hip, they get it wrong.

They call it automatic position system, reporting system. And it didn't start out about being about position systems, did it? It started about packet. Well, no. I would say that it really did. So the history of the naming for it. So packet radio became a thing in 1981 when the FCC allowed amateurs to start playing with it. And so during the 1980s, Bob Brunenga, WB4APR,

was working on this concept of location tracking over amateur radio. And so he actually took his call sign and back-renimed it into the automatic position reporting system. And so it was originally called the Automatic Position Reporting System. But as the concept of APRS grew and it became more than just an automatic tracking system and became this much more of this local situational awareness system where you can report not only your location but your status and your telemetry and what frequency you're listening to. He renamed it to being the automatic packet reporting system so it's not only positions but everything else. Okay so it's kind of gone back to its beginnings really with

how it's used nowadays. Yeah, right, and so it's one of those things where if someone calls it the automatic position reporting system, I won't correct them because they're not really wrong, because the lion's share of the use of it is just for vehicle tracking, but I personally call it the automatic packet reporting system. Okay, okay, and in what you said there already, we've got folks confounded when we're talking about showing situational awareness for our local area of operations, showing telemetry and our position as well. You know, APRS to me, it seems at the first blush, it seems so complicated, but at the very end,

it's such a simplistic system. And I think it's because as amateurs, we think that it's so much more than it really is because it'll do a lot. So in our minds, we make it harder than it really has to be. Oh yeah, yeah. So I mean, the objective of APRS,

the killer app for it is the concept that if you were to have some sort of event or a disaster, or even just in day-to-day life, if you were to take an amateur radio operator and drop him out of the sky into an area, within about 10 minutes, he should be able to, over APRS, collect all of the local situational information on where are the local repeaters, where are the local other hams,

where is the command center for this event, where is the local rest stops, where is the supply caches. The concept of APRS is that you can advertise all of these different local resources on this one national frequency so that anyone else passing through can listen on that frequency and just become aware of it.

anyone else passing through can listen on that frequency and just become aware of it. Which would be really cool if we kind of did it that way instead of just kind of doing all these other things that some of it's like that and some of it's not and some of it fits and some of it doesn't. It's a perpetual dream, right? We can always hope to get there. Well one of the questions I get asked all the time is why in the world would I want to invest in APRS? What are some of the sensibilities and the good reasonings behind participating in that aspect of the hobby? Well, that really

depends what you're trying to do, right? And so I use APRS quite a bit for event support. And so hams that invest in their own APRS equipment are much easier or much more useful respondents to like working for a parade or something because we don't, as an event staff, I then don't need to get APRS equipment installed in their vehicles. and during the event, I can follow them around and see them. In a day-to-day operations,

it's, I would say that APRS is really kind of interesting because it lets you see the other people around you. And so, like for example, if you're watching on APRS on your second radio, you can see a new ham pop up who's saying, hey, I'm listening on 146.52. And so you don't need to be listening to 146.52 and all four local repeaters.

You can see someone just pop up on APRS and you can go, oh, hey, I can Q you know, QSY over and talk to that person. Personally, I actually use it quite a bit when I'm like off-roading and camping is because APRS, a whole bunch of the traffic for it gets gateway to the internet. And so even though my mom isn't a ham, I can give her a link to say,

hey, if you want to know where I am, just look at this link. And so if my parents ever get worried while I'm out camping they can just look at oh hey look Kenneth's truck Just moved our ago, so he's fine Well, you know that's the thing about it It does a lot it really will do a lot and there's a pretty minimal investment of equipment That's required I mean you can go from anything cheap handy, a Bluetooth TNC to it.

Even now they've got cables that connect an Android phone to a handy talkie and you can eye gate there. And that's a term, whoa, I just just threw out an acronym or at least a word that, that may, that people may not know about. And there's almost like a whole glossary that goes along with the, the hobby of APRS. You know, one of the terms that gets kicked around a lot is iGate. Can you kind of give us an idea about what an iGate does?

Well, sure. Let's talk about the whole APRS infrastructure. So at the end points of the APRS network, you have what are called trackers or nodes, right? And so these are the radio that you put in your truck, or this is the base station that you have set up with your computer, and they're the endpoints where you're trading information between.

The problem is that since APRS is on this one frequency, it's a simplex network, and simplex doesn't have as great a range as repeater systems, right? Anyone that's tried to use simplex suffers from this. And so APRS has what are called digipeaters or digital repeaters, that they sit on mountaintops or on high towers or on the top of people's houses and they just listen for any packets coming in. And when they hear packets from a nearby station, they will repeat it again on the same frequency, right? And so you've now bounced from wherever you are down in a valley up to

the nearest mountaintop and gotten retransmitted from there. So that's how you kind of on the local RF side can propagate outwards a couple hops through these digipeders. As you are propagating outwards, you're going to be passing by these other stations called Internet Gateways. And what they are is they are a APRS node that is also connected to the Internet. And through that node, any packets they receive, they will gateway you onto the APRS IS system, the APRS Internet system.

And this is just the fire hose of every APRS packet in the entire world that's been heard by one of these internet gateways that come together and just are available online for your perusal. Yeah, and it doesn't take a whole lot to get there. But you do have to, you have to be heard through either RF or by a device that is set up as an internet gateway. Exactly. That's what happened to me.

We had Rob Riggs on one of the early shows back in season one of Hand Radio, actually then it was Folktime Podcast, but we had Rob Riggs on, great conversation, man. He's building this TNC2, which we'll link in the show notes. It's a great show, we'll have the link there as well. And he's talking about this device and I'm like I have got to get one of these because this has got to be one of the coolest things I've ever heard of in my life.

And I get one and I get it running and I'm testing it and I'm like oh it's squawking, it's working and I'd go in and go to APRS.FI and try to find myself and it would never show and I'm like it's busted. It's a piece of crap. But that wasn't, that, that was not the case. Actually do not think that that's a piece of crap is really a great little piece of equipment, but it has to be heard by someone who can either did you Pete it or repeat it to another station that can then get it in touch with the internet or it has to be heard by one of those stations on the front end.

Here in Spartanburg, South Carolina, we have two Digipeders in the county. One is my fill-in at my parents' house, another is a Cade HID up in the top end of the county, which is a long way from here. So that's why we weren't, I wasn't being heard, is just there was nobody to hear me. It wasn't an equipment problem, it was just a lack of technology in the county to be able to hear me. It wasn't an equipment problem, it was just a lack of technology in the county to be able to hear me. Oh sure, and that was my introduction to APRS as well. I first got introduced to it back when I was at, during graduate school down at California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo. And so I install a tracker in my pickup truck and I'm driving home back up to the Bay Area,

right, and it's a three hour drive. And so I'm driving North from San Luis Obispo. I hit the top of the grade and I look, I'm looking at like, uh, the, the plot of my, um, drive afterwards. I hit the top of the grade North of San Luis and I disappear for an hour and a half, just gone. And then all of a sudden you just magically reappear and there's a straight line across curvy roads and mountainous terrain.

Exactly. It's like this hundred miles of California, you just hopped over it. Yeah, it was one of those Star Trek things there. Yeah, right. And that was, and that's the central coast of California, which is kind of this notorious dead zone that we've got centered around King City. And this, and so this, this, that, that experience really got centered around King City. That experience really got me interested in APRS and what really is going on here.

King City has been my white whale for the last four years trying to figure out. I'm literally calling people in King City and saying, hey, do you have a spare antenna hanging up? Can I come install an iGate at your house? So if any listeners live in King City and are willing to provide me power and internet, I'll come install a DigiPedder iGate at your house. He's good on QRC by the way. Exactly. Look him up, Whiskey Six Kilo Whiskey, I'm sorry, Whiskey Six Kilo Whiskey Fox. His name is Kenneth Finnegan and we'll be back with Kenneth here in just a minute as we continue our conversation

about APRS. Hi, Dan KB6NU here. Whether you're studying for your tech license or looking to upgrade to general or extra, you should check out my No Nonsense Amateur Radio License Study Guides. Written in my easy to understand, no nonsensenonsense style, they really are the easiest way to learn what you need to know to pass the test. And they are always up to date. The PDF version of the Technician Class Study Guide is free on my website at kb6nu.com slash

podcast and all my study guides are available in print, PDF, Kindle, and EPUB versions. Let me help you have more fun with Ham Radio. Go to kb6nu.com slash podcast and get started today. So we're back with Kenneth Finnegan. His call is Whiskey Six Kilo Whiskey Fox. He is from Sunnyvale, California and he's helping me and you learn about APRS, the Automatic Packet Reporting System. And man, just the first segment was great learning about some of the terms there and why sometimes it works around where we live and why sometimes it doesn't. What are some other things that we need to consider if we're new into this? Maybe some experiences you had learning coming into this as a new ham.

Well, I mean, getting into APRS, kind of the hardest question you got to ask yourself is really what do you want to do with it? A lot of people, including kind of including me, are perfectly happy primarily using APRS as just a vehicle tracking system, right? So where is my pickup truck right now? And so really kind of what you end up wanting to do with it really dictates what sort of different gear you're gonna be getting and installing

for the APRS experience. When you're looking at just tracking, there's various different levels of what are called trackers that you can install in your vehicles to support APRS. And so on the kind of the high end, the Primo Deluxe experience, both Yezu and Kenwood actually sell mobile rigs that have APRS built into them.

So I mean, many people have APRS in their car and they don't even know it. Right. And so. Lucky dogs. Yeah, right. So like the Kenwood 710 is kind of, I think, one of the premier amateur radio off the shelf experiences.

And so on the LCD, I think you just hold one of the buttons and it'll switch you over into APRS mode. And then you can, from there, type in what your status message is. It'll show you any nearby stations that are on APRS. You can actually type in and receive text messages over APRS. And so the 710 supports that. Then you can go down to the low end where you don't want to have any of this interaction at all and you just want to do vehicle tracking.

At that point you're looking at stuff like the Bionics Microtrack AIO or All-in-One that's literally just a little orange Pelican case that you stick AA batteries in it and it has a GPS receiver in it, it has the radio in it, it's got an antenna connector, you just screw on an antenna and then you're good to go. And so it really depends on where you wanna fall in that spectrum. Personally, I kind of go in the middle where I take a Sparer Mobile Rig radio

and I wire it up to what is called a TNC or Terminal Node Controller. And this is kind of what we called modems in APRS land. Okay. All right. So the TNC or terminal node controller, that term dates back from the 80s when we were just getting started in packet radio. Because at that point, the concept of hooking the computer up to some packet network was just, it wasn't a thing. I mean, almost no one had computers.

And so they were building these things called terminal node controllers. What the concept was, you're hooking it up to your dumb virtual terminal, right? Or your line printer. And so that name has just kind of stuck. So when you hear people talking about their TNCs, they're talking about little boxes that are,

you know, have a radio modem interface on one side and have a serial port or a USB port on the other side. Okay. And this is what you do in your car? Yeah, so in my car I've got a Motorola commercial radio that I have programmed to just one frequency. I've got it on the 144.39 megahertz APRS frequency. It sits underneath my driver's seat and on the top of it, strapped to it with zip ties, I've got this little TNC from Argent Data. It's called the OT3M and so it's got a D sub connector on the back of it with a little audio cable running to the radio and then from the serial port, I've got it plugged into a magnetic mount GPS antenna

that sits on the top of my pickup. Right, and so if you look at my pickup truck, you'll see two 19 inch whips on it. One of them's for my voice radio, and the other one's for this APRS tracker. And then I've got a magnetic GPS antenna stuck to the side of it. Now, just, I want to stop you there real quick.

I know that two meters is crazy in the Bay Area and 440s is pretty hopping as well. 220s is exciting. Do you get any interference across the top of your truck if you're trying to talk on a lower frequency two meter repeater or say on 5.2 or anything like that? When it's squashed, do you get any crossover there? Yeah, it's one of those, I regret putting both of the antennas on the top of my pickup truck. You know, in an ideal world,

if you actually use VHF voice communications, you're really gonna wanna put this second antenna much farther away than just, you know, a couple feet away on top of my truck. That being said, in the Bay Area, yeah, VHF is hopping, UHF is hopping. We have no repeater pairs left, right? We're fully booked up here.

And so I actually tend to stick, almost all of the repeaters I want to talk on have both VHF and UHF inputs. And so I'll typically stick to the UHF side of the repeater. And so that, you know, on the VHF side I don't have to deal with randomly, you know, the conversation dropping out whenever my tracker happens to beacon. But yeah, that is a problem and I will, if I get into a good conversation on VHF, I'll typically just turn off the tracker for a few minutes.

Okay. Because it's right there under your seat. You just reach down, turn the knob, it's over. Yeah. I've got a little switch down by my radio. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that was just a question I thought I'd toss in there because that's something, you know, someone may have not considered until they have drilled a hole in their roof. And it may be one of those instances that potentially a front fender mount or a rear deck mount or something might be a little bit better location for your APRS tracker. Oh yeah, it's one of those things where depending on how much power you're running you're really kind of doing a good stress test on your two front ends. Right, a lot of these sets available there. Yes, yes.

Yeah, okay so you've got it running in your truck and you're tracking virtually everywhere you go. You're not trying to send messages through this Motorola commercial radio rig. You're just plotting yourself for your friends and family and fellow hams to follow you along. You said the Kenwood radio could message, you could send messages. I'm assuming that, and I say that I'm assuming, I I know what it is I'm asking for our listeners. That's just like a point-to-point text message, right? Yeah, so I mean APRS supports many different data formats, right? So not only does it support locations, but it supports these messages where you can from your station send out a packet and say, you know, send this packet to this other specific station and here is a relatively short,

you're limited to like 67 characters. Here is a 67 character long text message that I would like them to receive, right? And it actually, the network supports acknowledgement so that when you send it out, you can make sure that the other person got it because they will acknowledge it back. And so your radio will actually keep

sending it every you know every few minutes until it gets a acknowledgement back saying okay I got it like you can stop now. Well let me ask you this because in today's society I mean we're a text messaging society like MAD. Is that used often a lot with amateurs or are they just going to their iPhones now instead? Oh sure I mean sure, I mean it's not gonna be anywhere near as good as your iPhones, right? But when you're out and you're driving along and you see someone new, I mean so when you're driving along and your passenger sees someone new because you're not using the radio that's involved while you're driving, your passenger can sit there and go, oh hey, someone just popped up and all you know about

them is their call sign, right? All that's shown up is their call sign and maybe like a dash four or something, which is the secondary station ID. And so you'll see a lot of call signs with these numbers after that and all it means is that on RF you can have 16 different stations with just your call sign. And it's just a serial number, right? And so I have a, you know, my pickup truck is W6KWF-1. My desktop computer at home is W6KWF with no numbers after it. The digital repeater in my apartment's lab is a W6KWF-15, right?

So I just picked different numbers for all of them. So as you're driving along, all you know about this person is their call sign. And so you can sit right there and type out a text message to them, hey, what frequency you're on, or hey, all of us are hanging out on this repeater, like come check us out. Where it really becomes valuable and where I use it a lot is once you get past cell phone coverage, right? Because APRS is on VHF at you know 10 or 20 or 30 watts where cell phones are you know only one watt and much much higher

frequencies. Right. And so I can be out in the middle of sticks nowhere. I mean, King City is kind of the counter example, but I can be out in sticks nowhere, have APRS coverage and no cell phone coverage. And so this is where those internet gateways become real interesting because there's people that run servers online that are just hooked up to this fire hose that is all of the APRS traffic that listen for messages to these gateways they set up

to text messages for cell phones, email. And so, like I was actually, several years ago, I went to the Burning Man Festival out in the Nevada desert, no cell phone coverage out there, but Nevada has a great APRS community. They've built a fantastic APRS network across Nevada. And so I'm sitting in my pickup truck parked at Burning Man, and I'm able to type out, I hooked up a computer to this tracker underneath my driver's seat, and I was able to type out

emails to my parents saying, hey, I arrived, I'm fine, like everything's good. See you in a week. So instead of Windlink, you're using APRS. Yeah. Okay. Right. And it's, it's a short, you know, shorter, shorter form messages. Um, so, you know, like the email they got was essentially just a subject line. But right. But when you're out in the middle of nowhere and you need to get a message to someone, that's really all you need. Yeah. Let's say you were hurt somewhere and you were able to track your coordinates and you could send that. Right, and so like all week my parents would open up the browser and go, oh hey, you know, not that

my parents are that micromanaging, but they were really fascinated with this concept of me going out in the middle of the desert with 70,000 other people. And so it was reassuring to them to see, oh look, Kenneth's truck is still there and his battery voltage is at 12.3 volts, So he's fine. He's going to make it home. Yeah. That's pretty cool, man. Well, there's still a lot to talk about APRS. I mean, we just, we just, just touched on tracking and there's even more to it than

that, and I want to continue the conversation here in just a few moments. If we can, we're talking with Kenneth Finnegan. He is from Sunnyvale, California. His call us whiskey six kilo whiskey Fox. You want to make sure you check out his video links in the show notes. There's a lot of great information there and we're going to continue to learn with him as we come back here in just a moment. Icom continues to bring innovation to amateur radio like the number one selling HF rig in the world is the Icom IC7300. Maybe you

don't need a big huge SDR with knobs. Maybe you're looking for a solid, well built, well defined, really really nice dual band handy talkie. Let me refer you over to the ICOM ID 51. Yeah Richard has those too at MTCradio.com. If you're looking for ICOM gear visit my friends MTCradio.com. If you're looking for iCom gear, visit my friends, MTC radio.com. And we're back with Kenneth Finnegan. Thanks again, Kenneth, for being here. You know, we've talked about APRS, why we would may want to play there, what it would possibly take or what type of things you need to have in place before it works good, even how to follow yourself around in your car.

If you're interested in tracking your position, but you know, I think that there's still a lot of people out there that visit the APRS websites that look up APRS on YouTube or in some of the Yahoo groups and they're just still confused by it all. Why does it, why does this have to be so confusing? Well, that's a good question. That's kind of one of the down pitfalls of APRS is um, Bob Bernango, when he originally developed it, he came up with this genius idea because at the time, in the late 80s and the early 90s, that was the end of the bulletin board packet system, right?

Because during the 80s, we had this huge nationwide bulletin board system that was phenomenally valuable versus what at that time was the bulletin boards for the internet because you didn't have to tie up your phone line. Fast forward to the 90s, AOL's becoming a thing, internet's becoming a thing. Everyone's got these terminal node controllers that are no longer really being useful

and they're just kind of sitting on the shelf. So Bob Bernenga's kind of real breakthrough for APRS was this idea that he designed the protocol so that you could just take the existing terminal node controllers, fiddle with a few of the settings in them, and they became APRS nodes. And so it was this very kind of clever hack layered on top of the existing hardware that just happened to be sitting around. Then the next generation of TNCs come out and they kind of have to figure out, well, what's the layer of hacks that we can do on top of this one to support the same sort of messaging? And then it's just kind of been this 25-year evolution where we've always kind of not really been able to design the protocol so much as

kind of figure out how to make the protocol work with what we happen to have. And so it's been this long organic kind of duct tape on top of duct tape sort of growth that kind of makes for a very confusing hairy ball of a protocol which over the decades has had several different kind of generations to it that we can never really say, well, all right, ball of a protocol, which over the decades has had several different kind of generations to it, that we can never really say, well, all right, this feature is deprecated because people still use that feature. And so it's kind of always been this large, hairy ball of

kind of confusion. And I can speak from personal experience that that's what it has felt like to me, even to the point where I've asked questions in Yahoo groups and would just get this answer basically to the effect of, well, you should know what we're talking about. Almost like since you're a licensed amateur, you should have the same experience that I have over 35 years of experience of playing with terminal node controllers. When it's just go read this and this is about 17 pages long that you have to scroll through that began in 1997 and you're still reading updates in 2016. It can be very overwhelming, very frustrating.

Like I've told you many times, Kenneth, I've been ready to quit numerous times, but the investment, although it's minimal that I've made, it's still an investment and I've just haven't wanted to let it go. Yeah, sure. And it's that confusion that has got to be just this hazing that we do for new hams getting into the APRS system. So if you're feeling that confusion, embrace it. It means that you're paying attention. And I had the exact same experience, right?

So my introduction to APRS was I put the tracker and I pick up, I drove north out of San Luis Obispo, dropped off the face of the earth for two hours. So I then come back and I'm sitting there and going, you know, well, what went wrong? Like what, you know, what, what could I have changed? And so I start, I start researching it, right? Cause at that point I'm in college, I've got all the time in the world and no money as any good college student does. And so I started looking into it and it, it just, you know, layer after layer of this and I'm

going, oh my God, like, you know, how have we gotten here 25 years later? And so at that point I happened to also just be kind of looking for my master's thesis topic as I was a master's student at Cal Poly. And so I actually decided to do it on APRS. And so I shopped around the department and I found a graduate advisor that I sit down and I explained to her, I'm like, all right, I want to do it on this 30 year old, 1200 bit per second packet network, right? And this is in 2013.

And so she's sitting there and she's looking at it and going like, well, I'm not an amateur radio operator, almost nothing that you said means anything to me. Right, I don't know what this terminal node controller thing is you keep talking about, but you know, it sounds like an interesting project. So what the hell, let's do it. Right, and so then for the rest of my committee, I managed to round up all the rest of the licensed

professors in our department. And so I went and I did my master's thesis on APRS. That's when you know you're serious about it, folks. Yeah, right. So I now have a master's degree from Cal Poly. My master's thesis topic was examining the ambiguities in the automatic packet reporting system. It didn't end up, it's about 70 pages long, it didn't end up being this kind of great solution to it, but I spent a lot of time digging through all these old archives and trying to figure out not so much what all the answers were,

because trying to answer all of the questions, design questions for a packet network is really much more beyond the scope of trying to just get a master's degree. But I looked at, well, what do we not know? Like, what questions do the next five grad students doing their master's thesis on APRS need to ask? And there's a lot of tidbits and stuff in this document that I ended up writing. It's not a, I wouldn't say that it is the handbook for APRS, but anyone trying to get into APRS that's read

a few of the mailing lists and stuff, it's a great place to then go and see a lot more of these kind of tidbits collected together. All in one spot, all written within the last five years. And yeah, yeah. But, and you know, I really want to just love and embrace this technology because here's the, here's the fact of the matter. And I've said this on the show before.

I'm going to say it again. Uh, you know, we really, really want to be able to have this type of connectivity in, in this County to be able to, uh, share messaging back and forth, uh, to have it in case of an emergency, to use it for different events that the local clubs participate in, but there's just nothing, nothing built here for that and, and the brick walls that I find are always built by other amateurs who just kind of automatically assume you know exactly what they're talking about. Yeah that's for sure. Yeah so I appreciate you writing I've got a copy I've looked at

it I haven't really taken the time to study it yet, but I will because I am looking to continue to be educated on this. It's to me, I think it's really cool. And you know, it's just one of those things and you say things in quotation marks. That's another avenue of the hobby that a lot of people don't understand. So they read a little bit about it on one of the websites, scares them to death, they go the other direction and to never experience what it could really do for them. Yeah. So, you know, and at the same time, everybody's like, Oh, well, that's just GPS tracking. I've got that on my phone. So that's the other attitude that you get. Um, you utilize APRS on,

on some of the things that you do, um do regarding some of the volunteer gigs with your local community and the amateur radio there and some runs and whatnot. How have you found that the technology helps speed along reporting or whatnot during those events? Yeah, so kind of the typical application that we use it for is what we do is we'll, at the beginning of the day, install an APRS tracker in each of our support and gear vehicles, in each of the ambulances, or each of the fire trucks,

whichever vehicle resources we have allocated for the event. And then in our dispatch center, which would be a net control, for a smaller amateur event would be your net control operator sitting underneath the pop-up. But for some of the larger events I volunteer with, we've got whole rooms dedicated to kind of our, you know, net control command and control system.

We'll have a projector set up with a map of the course, and then each one of these resources that we put a tracker in end up as a little pinpoint on the map. And so then when on the radio you get a medical call from, hey, I'm at mile marker 15 and I've got a bicyclist down, all you have to do is you look up at the map and go, well, that ambulance number three is the closest one. What it does is it saves you this kind of asking around for, well, hey, ambulance one,

where are you? And hey, ambulance two, are you over hey, ambulance one, where are you? And hey, ambulance two, are you over there? You know, which one of you is closest? You can just look at the map and go up, that one's closest, calm up, allocate them to the event and you know, you're off to the races, right? And so it's not like APRS solves anything that you can't already solve on voice communications, right? You can ask everyone where they are or kind of keep track of it. It's just that APRS makes it so much easier. And so it's just, it's, you know, so that I, you know, I'm going to say it and Bob Vernego would hate me for it, but the killer app for APRS is just this vehicle tracking system.

Every article that Bob starts, he says, it is not just a vehicle tracking system. Every article that Bob starts, he says, it is not just a vehicle tracking system. And he's right, it's not. But when you're looking at this event support stuff, the vehicle tracking is 97% of the usefulness of it. I also use, when I set up a remote radio site, because for some of these events, we'll deploy temporary repeaters

with a solar panel and a car battery. And so I'll also just kind of sneak in an APRS node there because APRS supports telemetry, right? And so I can sit there and from the comfort of the dispatch center, I can get a voltage reading off of the batteries and off of the solar panel and be able to see the state of the cooling fan

because that sort of stuff is supported over the telemetry packet. So every 10 minutes it says, alright, this is my battery voltage, this is the state of the fans, like this radio site is good. Cool. Well, you know, and I'll give you a real life experience here. We just, back in October, early October, we had the Hurricane Matthew come up the coast of South Carolina and I was listening to our linked system repeater system here in South Carolina and the guys down on the coast were out and about kind of

assessing what was going on during the situation and one guy called in he said hey I'm here at whatever and whatever I have a downed tree and they said we see you which alluded to the fact that he was being tracked via APRS. We see you and we've got the coordinates. We'll pass that on to the local emergency management people. So that was really cool. I heard it.

I knew what they were doing and it was really neat to kind of be like, wow, that worked really quick and really good right there. I could see how well this could work on a bike race, a foot race, any type of event that amateur radio operators support. Oh yeah, for sure, right? As I've, a couple of years ago, one of our drivers actually got lost

at the Wildflower Triathlon. And the thing is, all of the roads out there, they're all dirt fire roads. And so it's not like we've got signposts. And so they're saying, they're like, I'm in an intersection with five roads, I'm totally lost. And so we, we talked them back onto an asphalt road, just kind of looking at the map, like, okay, you're coming up to the intersection, you want to turn right there. And so yeah, it's,

it's as great, this great ability to have GPS locations given to you. We're trying to you're trying to read it a raw GPS address, a coordinate over the radio really is kind of miserable because you're sitting there like, well, was that an 8 or a 4? Right? And so there's just a lot of digits to it. And so that's where the packet radio really is valuable and just be able to puke all of this, you know, the string of numbers and then you show up on the map. Yeah.

string of numbers and then you show up on the map. Yeah, and speaking of the map guys, you can go right now to APRS.FI and check out what all is happening on APRS. Not just in South Carolina, I mean you can look at your county, your state, the nation, the world, you can just pull around wherever you want to go. It's all there. Whatever's being reported to an eye gating device is showing up right now live on APRS.FoxIndia. Oh yeah. Yeah, and kind of one thing that people do get a little confused about is APRS.FI,

that isn't APERS, right? That is just one guy's website that happens to be tied into this fire hose that is the APRS IS kind of backhaul. And so yeah that was that was written by a guy named Hezu out in Finland that yeah he just took he collects all of the APRS traffic he sticks it in a database and then overlays it onto Google Maps and it's a really really clean great interface. Yeah, yeah. When we come back if we can I want to talk a little bit about using

APRS from your shack and why someone would want to do that and how to make that happen. That's good with you. Yeah sure. Alright we'll be back with Kenneth Finnegan his colleague in Whiskey Six Kilo Whiskey Fox. He's good on QRZ and we've got a lot of his links on our show notes here as well as some links to his videos on YouTube. Back in just a moment Ham Radio 360 podcast. I think I can speak for George and Jeremy both that we adore hearing from our audience. It's always cool to catch up with you guys and to see what's going on. It's really exciting too when you get the emails,

hey I was just licensed, I just passed my test. The reason I decided to get into Ham Radio was I found this podcast and you guys inspired me. Thank you so much and wow, how humbling is that? How cool is that? And I've got a request for all you new guys and gals out there. If you've recently gotten your technician's license,

let's say since December 1, 2016, now if you've been licensed between now and December the 1st 2016 please message me email text whatever emails preferred because I'm an older guy Kale at ham radio 360 comm if you're a new technician Licensee you just got your tech license between December 1st and now please email me I've got some questions to ask you in maybe some ways that I can even help you. Kale at hamradio360.com.

So we're back with Kenneth and you know, I've said it probably too many times during this program but I'm trying to get APRS working around here. One of the things I really want to be able to do is sit in my shack and look at a computer monitor and have it show me what's happening around me on APRS and that's really not a big deal as it sounds is it? No that's exactly you know that's exactly what it was designed for right and so the the easiest solution answer to that is well you know you just pull up APRS at FI and you zoom in on wherever you are right but you know I think at your place you don't even have

internet access out in the middle of sticks nowhere and so that's where APRS on the RF side really becomes valuable right and so kind of to get get someone started in APRS from a base station side what you're looking at is you just have to find the spare VHF radio, ideally one that's got nice interface pins on the back of it. So I think, I know particularly Yezu, but a couple of the radio manufacturers

have been trying to standardize on that little mini-DIN 6 pin. And so you find one of those VHF radio, you hook it up to antenna, you wire that up to a terminal node controller. And a lot of the terminal node controllers support this mode called the KISS mode. KISS mode is kind of this binary transport

where the terminal node controller doesn't do anything. And all it does is it streams all the packets back to your computer and from your computer to the TMC. So it just it translates? Yeah at that point like it's it's literally indistinct like it's we're talking about like external dial-up modem right is it's it's very very similar where you on an external dial-up modem you've got your computer hooked up through a serial port to this little metal box and the little metal box, and the little metal box on the other side

goes out to whatever your channel is, right? In the case of a dial-up external modem back in the day, that was a telephone line. It's just that now instead of a telephone line, we're using, sorry, your VHF radio. Yeah. Right, and so then, so once you get that set up, at this point, you can, you can pick any,

almost any APRS desktop software you want because they all speak the same KISS protocol. Right. And so when you're downloading various applications online and trying them out, all you need to do to get it to talk to your radio is know your serial port and find where in the software it says configure for a KISS serial port. And this doesn't have to be guys, okay now I've got to go buy another Windows 10 machine at Costco for $700. I mean this is a $35 Raspberry Pi 3. Oh yeah, because the the APRS, it's 1200 bits per second, right? And so you're

not going to overwhelm your computer with the volumeless data coming out of your local RF network. Right. Especially in Spartanburg, South Carolina, folks. Exactly. That's a whole other discussion. So that gives me an RF view of what's going on around me. Now I can set up my station here at the house with a TNC and a radio connected to a big stick antenna out in the yard and I can push information out there for anybody who's driving up Interstate 26 going from Charleston to Asheville and I can let them know if I want to, hey, there's a wreck on 26. Or I can let them know, hey, local club repeater, 147-315, tone 123.

Come by and say, hey. Or I could tell them I'm monitoring 146-52. I could tell them anything. And as they drive through, it's like an old cell phone. You know, as they drive through my cell or if they pick it up from another DigiPedder, they'll get that information displayed if they have a display type connection in their vehicle.

Yeah, right, and so that brings in a new APRS format that we haven't talked about yet, which is called Objects. Right, and so the APRS location packets let you give your own GPS location and then it gives you a little bit of space at the end to say a status message. So like I'm listening on this frequency or I'm having a great day or whatever you wanna say.

Ham Radio 360 podcast is my favorite. Exactly, right? You could set up your tracker to say that. And so typically for like a base station, you'd be beginning that every once, every, 15, or 30 minutes saying just this is my location, this is my status. But when you then want to start talking about these other abstract resources that are other places in the network than where you are, you would put out what are called objects. And so an object packet comes

out of your radio saying, all right, so Kale has beaconed this object that has this name, right, so you could, you know, call it, it's like a nearby object that I could beacon here would be like, I'm one of the trustees for the W6 TDM repeater. And so I could say the W6 TDM repeater is in this general location, right. And so if you want to give it an exact GPS location, you can do that. If you want to say that it's just in this vague vicinity, right? And so if you want to give it an exact GPS location, you can do that. If you want to say that it's just in this vague vicinity, APRS supports that as well,

is you can give the location any level of certainty that you want. And so you can say, in this vague vicinity is the W6 TDM repeater. And it is on, and then there's a specific format on APRs for frequencies, right? So you can specify, it is on 440.150 megahertz, it has a positive five megahertz offset,

it has a 100 hertz PL tone. And so in the ideal case, and this is a feature that isn't really well tested, anyone driving through and their radio, their Kenwood 710 radio receives this packet. Ideally what they should be able to do is just say, yeah, I want to go to that repeater. They can just click on it and it'll take it to them.

It's not a well tested feature. Ironically for someone who did his master's thesis on APRS, I own relatively little off thethe-shelf APRS gear. So I've actually been, like, I horse-trade with people that have spare Kenwoods and Yeasys, like, hey, can I borrow your radio for a few weeks? I need to do some testing on it. And so it's not a well-tested feature,

but that's kind of the concept, right? And so if there was an accident that showed up, you could, depending on the software, it's a completely different interface for how you add them, but you can somehow add this new object that is for that other pinpoint that you want to put on people's maps. Nice. So it's a continually evolving technology. Oh yeah, right.

It's one of these things where the standards committee, and that's a very generous term for what it is, it's a bunch of us on a mailing list, we're very adamant that you can do whatever you want with APRS, which has the disadvantage that you'll see a lot of the documentation kind of deliberately not give you specific guidance on, well, what routing path do you use and what aliases should you respond to? But it gives you this great flexibility that if you wanna run it as,

like if for your group you only wanna run it as a vehicle location system, you can just run it as a vehicle location system. If you want it to be this great local situational awareness system where you can advertise all the local repeaters and you can advertise where the You know the where the local monthly amateur radio club meeting happens you can advertise that right? So you can place a pinpoint for hey, we've got a you know tonight. We're doing our club meeting

golden corral Right or you know hey every Sunday a bunch of us got a bunch of us hams kind of just meet up at the local Denny's and you know have breakfast right that sort of thing you can put that pinpoint on the map and that APR supports that right and so it is very it's a very very flexible protocol which is kind of you know both the good and bad of it. Well let me ask you this because let's say somebody's like oh this is it. Kale has convinced me, Kenneth has told me what I need to know. I'm jumping in headfirst, I'm buying me a I need to know. I'm jumping in head first.

I'm buying me a tracker. I'm putting it in the car and I'm ready to go. Okay, so that's one person. We're gonna hear that. We've kind of covered those guys pretty good. What about the person who wants to maybe do a little something more in depth and they are aware that there's APRS in their area.

Would it be in their best interest to find someone that's involved in the local APRS in their area, would it be in their best interest to find someone that's involved in the local APRS network to help them set up their paths? And you can explain what a path is if you want to, but help them get those things nailed down properly to match what happens in their local area. Yeah, so I mean, you know, one of the difficulties of APRS is that it is so flexible that most areas have kind of developed these local coordinating groups and kind of their own little special interests mailing lists. So like, for example, for California, California is a very different beast when it comes to

APRS than when you're out in the Midwest or on the East Coast because we have these 5,000 foot mountains and we have a digipeter on the top of a 5,000 foot mountain you just don't need any more digipeters in the local area anymore. Right and it's one of those questions where like even people in California will disagree with that statement I just made because it's a very sticky situation for how do you design your local network. Right? And so you'll, I cannot encourage people enough to find your local Elmer's to kind of walk you through, well, this is, you know, kind of, and have them do a sanity check on, well,

this is what you have set up. Like is this, does this make sense? Does this not make sense? That sort of thing. You're going to get a lot of support at the local level for that. So, you know, it's one of these things where it's kind of a blessing and a curse when New Hams get really excited about APRS and like they set up their own DigiPeter on top of their house because maybe three other guys have also gotten really excited about it and set up DigiPeter is

real close to that. And so you will get some sort of inner you will get some kinds of interference there. And they're all running 75 watt you know Yesu 2900 or something. Exactly, exactly right. Where I mean for APRS you really I wouldn't say that you need that much power right so like on my trucks tracker I only run I have a little toggle switch that switches it between 5 and 18 watts, right? And like 20 watts is pretty high power for a DigiPeder in California in particular. But yeah, like, you know, at most we're talking about

like maybe you're running your radio at medium or maybe at 50 watts at the most. Right, and so it's one of these things where you need to, if you want to get more into it, or maybe at 50 watts at the most. And so it's one of those things where you need to, if you want to get more into it, you start getting involved with a local working group to set up the local infrastructure. And if you don't have one of those,

you create it yourself. Yeah, right, and so how we first started, the two of us first started talking about this was the fact that you have no APRS, almost no APRS coverage locally at all. Yeah. Right, and so this kind of, the reason why you started talking to me is because, you know, while working

on my master's thesis for this, for my master's thesis and all of these experiments I was running, I started using one of the DigiPeter software packages called APRX, right, so that's Alpha Papa Romeo X-Ray. APRX is a Linux-based DigiPeter software, right? And so it's designed so that you can take a terminal mode controller in KISS mode and you can take even just a Raspberry Pi

running this APRX software, and it'll act as a DigiPeter. Right, and so I actually, I started using that a lot and the guy who originally wrote it, Mati, he had this problem that real life is much more important than amateur radio. And so he had kind of, it kind of had, it was suffering from a kind of a lack of ownership.

And so I talked to him a few times and he's like, and he actually was more than happy to have me take over ownership for maintaining APRX, right? And so if you go look up APRX, I'm actually the current maintainer for it. Nice. And so if you wanted to set up a DigiPeter in an area, you could use APRX running on a Raspberry Pi

or any sort of computer running Linux and have it acting as your local DigiPedder or internet gateway. Which is sweet because just the other day here on Twitter, was it Twitter or Facebook? I think it was Twitter because you were there. And someone mentioned, hey, if you're going to put up a dual band antenna for your UHF repeater, Kale, that's an excellent opportunity to put a iGate there at the fire station with your repeater and run them at the same time on the same antenna. Oh, yeah, yeah.

All the time I will set up a dual band, like an X50 diamond antenna and drop it out to a diplexer because all the repeaters I use are UHF. And so I drop the diplexer out and I make sure I have one radio that's sitting on my UHF repeater and I make sure not to tune it to VHF because the VHF side of the diplexer is going into an APRS internet gateway. So what we're saying here folks is in addition to the K4 CDN repeater, we're gonna put, Kel's gonna put, and I'm gonna beg Kenneth to help me, put an

iGate there as well for APRS. And you know that's the awesome thing about an audience and having, and you know this from YouTube, you get some of the best ideas from the people you surround yourself with. And I mean you talk about out of the blue, it's like, I never even considered that. And I've got the X 50 antenna here to go, to go up for the repeater. And man, I didn't cross my mind. Now I got to buy a diplexer, which will probably happen after this

phone call, this call today. Oh yeah. Yeah. Right. And then MFJ makes a pretty, pretty decent one. That's about $30. Cool. Um, right. And so the, the, the so the die flexors are in the scope of the filtering cost that you already have for a repeater.

It ends up being real attractive. Nice. Nice. So that's you know, again here we're talking other projects on the 360 show, but just kind of showing you an additional means of integrating this type of APRS technology into something that you may already have just sticking out there on the tower or the side of the house. You got a dual band antenna. You're a UHF guy like me, so you've got all this freedom

to use VHF for this APRS thing. Kenneth, what have we forgotten to share with people about APRS? Oh God, we could go on for two or three more hours about the minutia of APRS. Well, we may need to come back and do a follow-up show in all sincerity because I think that more than likely this is gonna just spur more questions,

which is always great because I always like to continue learning. Oh right, and you said at the beginning, is it's real hard, those of us that are on the kind of the standards committee and that really focus on developing kind of the new conventions for APRS, we're kind of lost out in the weeds as far as the protocol. And so when someone new comes on and is confused about the fundamental parts of APRS, I will admit that we aren't very good at presenting it. Right. And so

like if someone were to ask right now, well well what website do I go to for a good introduction to APRS, I would have to admit there really isn't one. Yeah. Right, and so yeah, I totally expect people in the audience to send in lots and lots of really great questions that we just kind of glossed over because the two of us have already talked about APRS for a couple hours. I live in this stuff, I spend several hours a week

writing emails and documents about it. So yeah, I think- He wrote his master's thesis on it, folks. I mean- Yeah, right, I mean, I wrote my master's thesis and I still put out a couple, one or two pages of documentation on it per month as we're kind of continuing to suss out

these little ambiguities. So right after I finished my master's thesis, like any good graduate student, I dropped APRS and didn't touch it for a year and a half because once you've written a thesis on something, you just don't want anything to do with it. So I gave it a year to kind of just sit over in the corner and cool off, but in the last year or so,

I've kind of been getting back into it and really I've gotten real active on the mailing list and I'm working on just really starting to write more of these little snippet articles so that if you wanted to learn about telemetry, I think there needs to be a good repository somewhere where I can have lots and lots of articles for this is how the telemetry system works this is how the frequency specs work right and I think I think all of these little pieces of the protocol can always be improved with better documentation. Well you know and the thing about it is it's this conversation our previous conversation it's a further example of

this hobby and how like I have said it so many times, I've been involved in multiple hobbies throughout my adult life and not one have I found that has been so giving and and so welcoming to someone who has questions and needs answers. And although there's not a lot of answers to your questions floating around on the internet out there right now of APRS. We're going to continue to address this and going in right now going ahead and invite Kenneth back for a follow-up show potentially after the first of the year to talk more about APRS as I continue my projects here myself David, Gary, Andy, William, Pelletha. We've been working for for two years and we're we're at that tipping point,

we're at the pinnacle where we're ready to start running down the hill without our helmets on to get this thing running. So, Kenneth, man, thank you so much for sharing with us about APRS and taking your time to be here with us on the program. We thank you for listening to the show. We're so excited that we know at least one person went to Pacificon last year and learned about our show and came back and has been listening and now participating. So thank you man we really appreciate you being here. Oh yeah I'm really happy to be here I enjoy it. And again we'll have links to Kenneth's videos, his YouTube channel, probably some some links to other things that he believes you will find of interest and help as well. So make sure

you check out our show notes. They're there every episode and we talk about it and you may or may not realize the amount of information that's there. It's not a bunch of Kell writing stuff. It's the links. It's pointing you where you're looking to go. So if you're wanting to learn more about this topic and others that we've covered in the past, remember to visit hamradio360.com. Kenneth, his call is Whiskey6, Kilo WhiskeyFox. Thanks again, man. So, so much appreciate you being here with us.

Oh yeah, for sure. As far as following me online, you know, you mentioned Twitter a little bit, but I'm real active on Twitter, you know, at KWF. And then if people want to read kind of more of my longer form rantings and blogging stuff I also I you know most of my YouTube videos really are not so much just YouTube videos But they're their videos to be dropped onto my blog at blog dot the life of Kenneth calm cool cool We'll have those link there for sure in the show notes and again. Thank you for coming on Absolutely, thank you

So do you feel better about AP RS? I mean, really, is that show, did it make you like, just a big sigh of relief? I know it did for me. Now granted, I've had, I had the two-hour private conversation with Kenneth, but really wanted to cover those bases that he and I did on the phone. Not necessarily specific to what Kel's trying to do here in the upstate of South Carolina, but to help us all get a good grasp of this thing that seems so elusive on the backside and really it's not. And I hope that this show has done what we intended for it to do, and that is to make it easy to understand APRS and everything involved.

Now again, I want to remind you, hamradio360.com. That's our home base. That's where all of our show notes are, our podcast episodes, the workbench. We have content creators listed there that are pushing there. We've got blogs. We have RSS feeds for the podcast. A lot of it's there at hamradio360.com. So if we went too fast today, or maybe you listen in the car, you can't remember, hamradio360.com. We'll get you back to what we've been talking about here on Ham Radio 360. Now, I want to again say thank you to Kenneth, who is Whiskey Six, Kilo, Whiskey Fox. Man, thank you so much. And yeah, I need some more help. We'll talk about

that later. But Kenneth, really appreciate you coming on, man. The show was great. The information was awesome. We could probably do another program and we probably will as a follow up as we continue to learn more about APRS. Hey, don't forget our friends at Ellicraft.com. It's hands on ham radio. If you're needing a KX2, KX3, a K3S, some of those phenomenal rigs that you can take out in the field, maybe you can leave them in the shack. They're all there at Ellicraft.com.

And if you decide to head over that way, which we hope you do Please let them know that you heard about them here on ham radio 360. I appreciate you guys listening. Thank you so much It's always our pleasure to be here with you. We can't wait every week winterfell day is coming up I'm sure we'll have some follow up on that on a very very soon coming show work benches next week. God bless you guys Thank you so much for listening 73 y'all coming show. Work benches next week. God bless you guys. Thank you so much for listening. 73 y'all. Thank you for listening to Ham Radio 360 brought to you by MTC radio.com. For more information about the program, visit hamradio360.com. Till next time, 73s y'all.