David
Sawyer, K1DRS
,and I took a short road trip to San
Antonio, Texas in early may of this year to sample a WOTI
member’s famous barbeque.
During the trip out and on the way back, APRS
reporting was active all the time, except for a short period
in eastern Arizona when I changed the GPS output for loading
a route and forgot to set it back to the correct setting when
I finished. Don
Weber, KA7QQV, called me on my cell-phone to see
if something happened because he stopped getting our position
updates. It was
don’s phone that alerted me to the bad setting when I began
looking into why the updates weren’t being sent out.
This mistake hasn’t happened since.
Traveling to and from San Antonio covered 3,933 miles
and position reports were available along most of the route.
They weren’t any reports reported for the area east of
El Paso, Texas to Sonora, Texas because of lack of people and
hams radio operators using APRS.
Another place where
position reports weren’t available was near Corona, California.
Shortly after David and I turned onto Rt-91 from I-15,
I discovered my GPS unit turned off.
This seemed strange, so I turned it back on again and
went back to watching the road. A few minutes later I looked down again to see how we were
progressing on the programmed route display and found the unit
turned off again. I
turned it on, and within a few miles, it was off again.
On I pushed, off it blinked.
This On/Off struggle continued until I didn’t want to
risk not looking where I was going any longer.
Later in the hotel room, the unit repeated its bad behavior
and continued it through the next morning.
Without the GPS
delivering position information to the broadcasting beacon,
no position information is updated and my position report showed
me parked on the highway for a few days after we had returned
home.
During
the ride up I-5 the following day, the GPS began working again
and worked flawlessly until last Saturday about half way through
the ALA event. Why
this happening isn’t obvious, but I’m suspecting it will need
emergency surgery at the GPS hospital.
When position reports
stop, so does the position marked on the map. I've been
back home for a couple of days now and the "X"
on the map shows I'm still waiting at the light on Capitol Expressway
waiting for it to change.
