Yesterday after work I took the bike over to a location with good line of sight, powered up the GPS, connected it to the D7A, and then powered up the D7A. I was receiving APRS traffic and transmitting my position as a beacon. However, I was unable to receive back my packet – so I’m concluding that my signal was not making it to the local digipeater (N4EVA-11). As the D7A is a dual-bander, I left the top band on the APRS freq and the bottom band I set to scan regular local voice repeaters and the placed the D7A in the handlebar bag. On my ride home I could here APRS traffic and a few calls on the regular repeaters, but I could tell reception was poor. I’m assuming having the D7A in the bag greatly diminishes my over all signal strength.
What I have yet to verify is that data being passed from the GPS to the D7A is being xmitted. My earlier test where I successfully passed a packet to the digipeater was from a lat/long location directly programmed into the D7A, not from the GPS.
Right now for a UNPROTO I’m using WIDE3-3. I’m going to change it to RELAY,WIDE and see if that makes it to the digipeater. In the past (with the TinyTrak) I’ve tried using an UNPROTO of N4EVA-11 and then to the Igate. But that’s never worked. I think N4EVA-11 only digipeats RELAY. I’m going to do a little fiddleing around with it this morning.