N1PEB
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Post by N1PEB on Jun 27, 2018 3:56:21 GMT -8
G4KLX TweetNot sure how quickly this gets rolled out, but glad to see its being addressed.
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N1PEB
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Posts: 38
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Post by N1PEB on Jun 28, 2018 13:39:47 GMT -8
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Post by N6HKH on Jun 28, 2018 14:50:22 GMT -8
Here is the text of Jonathon's post in the Yahoo ircDDBgateway forum referenced above: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:36 am (PDT) . Posted by: naylorjs Hi All After you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, yes, I’m still here! And I’ve been busy. Kenwood UK were kind enough to lend me a TH-D74E at Ham Radio in order to get my D-Star software to decode the D-Star GPS data transmitted from the radio and send it on to aprs.fi, just like I do for Icom radios already. It turned out to be a bigger problem than I first expected and the bottom line is that I have succeeded but at the cost of losing a little Icom GPS functionality, but don’t worry, I’ll explain it in detail below. In the beginning, Icom used raw NMEA sentences for the GPS data in the slow data. It usually sent $GPGGA and $GPRMC sentences and used the weak NMEA XOR checksum. Pete AE5PL worked out a way of using the GPS text to embed information about the APRS symbol to use. The only problem with this is that a lot of data needed to be transmitted to make a valid APRS message, and any bit errors would make it invalid. Icom realised this and in radios from the IC-92D onward added the GPS-A mode. In this mode the radio transmits an already formed APRS packet with a strong checksum. This meant that much less data needed to be received to create a valid APRS entry, meaning it had more chance of arriving uncorrupted. The ircDDB Gateway supported both formats, including the handling of the user defined symbols as defined by AE5PL. The Kenwood radio goes the same way as the original Icom format, with all of the same drawbacks. In addition it doesn’t include the ability to add any GPS text meaning that you can’t easily set your own symbols. I did play around with using the slow data text message for this, but it made the message useless to humans receiving it. Therefore I made the decision that the symbol would be fixed to that of a “Kenwood (HT)” and with no accompanying descriptive text. However the location and the callsign are correct. For Icom radios using GPS-A there is no change of processing, but for any older Icom radios using the original GPS format, they will lose the ability to set their symbol and description text, and they will appear as a Kenwood radio! I am not sure this is a big issue though as GPS-A appeared almost ten years ago and the original format, in Icom radios at least, is probably just of historical interest. A breaking change is that you now have to enter a default aprs.fi password into the registry (Windows) or configuration file (Linux). It is labelled as aprsPassword and it is a five digit number. The upside of this is that gating to aprs.fi is now independent of access to an ircDDB system. If you have a TH-D74E and want it’s GPS data to be sent to aprs.fi, you only need to run the latest edition of the ircDDB Gateway from github.com/g4klx/ircDDBGatewayhttps://github.com/g4klx/ircDDBGateway and on your radio set menu item 630 (GPS Info in Frame) to On. The default Sentences (menu 631) are correct, $GPGGA and $GPRMC. Leave menu 632 (Auto TX) at Off. I would like to express my thanks to Mark M0DXR at Kenwood UK, via Bernd DH5IS, for the loan of the TH-D74E. It is a beautiful radio, I wish I could afford one. Oh, I've also updated the code for wxWidgets-3.0.x. There you go, but there is more to come… Jonathan G4KLX PS I think this is in time for the Thursday night net on the XRF002/310/555 cluster.
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N1PEB
New Member
Posts: 38
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Post by N1PEB on Jan 19, 2019 13:12:37 GMT -8
Happy to report that the latest PiStar 4 RC2 does support the Kenwood TH-D74 DPRS like capability. I was able to see my position being posted to aprs.fi. Also noticed that the correct position was embedded within the DPRS link on the XRF313 dashboard.
The initial release did not include an aprsPasscode field within ircDDBGateway to enter your passcode, but this was quickly fixed.
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