Recently, I have been tinkering with APRS and packet radio. It seems a bit weird to go back in time, fooling with 19200 baud rates while I work I deal with 100 megabyte internet circuits. Technology has improved over the years when packet radio was first introduced.<br>
There is some cool stuff you can do with packet radio and APRS that I am interested in.<br>
Including tracking the location of something using a GPS, a TNC, and a radio. This combination transmits its GPS coordinates location via the ham radio that you can recieve and display on a laptop computer with another TNC, radio, and a laptop. With some special software, you can get a map showing you where your device is. Works good when you need to track where someone is.<br>
The other cool thing you can do that I am interested in is report weather data and other telemetry data. For example, voltage of a solar system at a remote site. Temperature, relay status, etc... I think you can report just about any data you can get out of a serial port over radio.<br>
For equipment, I ended up purchasing a TinyTrak4 from Byonics. I was trying to keep it low budget and the Kantronics TNC's were running about $80 on Ebay. I went with the TinyTrak because it will do the GPS tracking, and you can simply re-program it to work as a KISS TNC, as well as a couple other functions. I am very frugal, always looking to get the most bank for my buck.<br>
I purchased a Motorola Maxtrac VHF model, since I had so much luck with them when I built my GMRS repeater. They are a pain to program with DOS, but once they work, they work and if you shop around you can pick them up cheap in Ebay ($30 or so)