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ge0rg / aprsdroid

APRSdroid - Geo-Location for Radio Amateurs
https://aprsdroid.org/
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Trying to Determine Use Case #350

Open teek541 opened 10 months ago

teek541 commented 10 months ago

Hey guys, I'll totally close this and post it somewhere else if it's more appropriate. But I'm trying to determine a use case for this. I use an FTM-400 in my Ford and have a spare one I can use for my off roading truck. I currently have a microtrac in my Off Roading truck for giving my wife piece of mind knowing where I'm at as well as my own lo-jack solution.

I use the truck for SAR purposes and would like the ability to do messaging through APRS easier. I know Byonics has a radio with build in BT. I'm thinking about mounting an android tablet in my truck and using the BT version (MicroTrak MTT4BT). I wanted to get that unit, hook it up to an Android Tablet, and use it for interacting with APRS and using it as an offline station plotting APRS beacons on maps and sending/receiving messages from other APRS stations.

Is this possible with APRS Droid? I've seen mixed things about sending/receiving messages through APRS Droid.

gunnardave commented 10 months ago

APRSdroid does messaging fine. All the core APRS functions work. There's a lingering offline map issue but that's only really important to me since I use a phone that is not activated for my 4WD APRS. Since the phone lacks (intentionally) a Google account or a SIM card I have to directly load map tiles. And even that isn't really the issue, it's just being built on Mapsforge V3 requires more effort on my part to find (or generate) compatible files.

I connect to the TNC using one of Byonics' Bluetooth-to-RS232 adapters (their part number is TT4BT). I imagine the BT chip they use in it is the same as their all-in-one radio. It's an HC-05 I believe. This BT adapter works fine with a TT4 and an Argent T3-301 (TNC inside a little data radio). APRSdroid on that phone also works fine with a Mobilinkd TNC3 via BT.

My guess would be much of the complaints stem from unrealistic expectations about relatively slow, highly congested RF networking. I've not found any situations where I could say another client would have worked better. There are plenty of poorly tuned radios and modems out there, jamming packets out at much too high a rate to share bandwidth, never seeming to wait for ACKs.

teek541 commented 10 months ago

I get that. It took a bit of tuning to get my packet rate correct on mine.

It looks like they are having difficult sourcing BT components. The MTT4BT and the TT4BT are sold out. I reached out to Byonic and they said they aren't anticipating making the MTT4BT due to supply issues. Looks like my hopes and dreams of using my FTM-400 as an actual dual channel radio are not going to work out after all. I may have to use that for my BT APRS radio.