Last year, some friends and I launched and lost a balloon with a bunch of cameras on it and multiple ways of tracking it. You can see the videos that I made about that here and here.

Recently I’ve been wanting to play around with gps/ham/aprs trackers and there isn’t really a great place to read up on aprs in one place, if yoiu’ve got good links, drop them in the comments please. I want to learn more!

The easiest way to get into it, is to get the Byonics Microtrak300. Keep in mind you’re going to need a null modem adapter and a female to female gender switcher and a decent usb to serial adapter. You’re also going to need a windows PC although you might be able to do it with parallels on the mac.

I didn’t have a null modem adapter so I checked out this diagram and wired it up on a breadboard to program it. It only uses 4 of these pins so it’s just a matter of switching pins 2 and 3 and connecting pin 5.I’ll take a picture next time I set it up to program it. It took me a while to figure this out because I was using an old laptop that had a serial out and either it didn’t have enough power to make the serial out work, or the serial out just didn’t work. We had a windows 2000 box laying around the hacker space and with some help from a friend, we broke into it and set it up. Having a regular serial out is really nice. USB to serial adapters can be fussy. You’ll also want to look at the device manager to see which COM port your hooked up to. I was hooked up to COM1.

Once I got it set up, I loaded up the software. Basically, you just slap in your call sign, pick the type of image you want to show up on maps, a little message, and how often you want it to beacon. Then you write it to the chip and you’re all set. I cut the gps serial cord and hooked it straight up to the device so it’s hard wired now.

Despite the fact that I’ve mounted it on the top of the 9 story building at the hacker space, I haven’t had much luck in getting it to hit a repeater station yet. I’ve been looking for it on findu.com, ariss.net, aprsworld.net, and openaprs.net and so far, no luck. I’m going to attempt to see if I can get it to hit the space station later tonight, but as it is, there may not be a local aprs internet gateway or I’m doing something wrong or I need more power. I’ll keep you posted!