VA3SWO-1 APRS Digipeater

VA3SWO-1 APRS Digipeater

In 2009, an APRS Digipeater was setup at the QTH of Dave, VE3HKO.  At the very top of his 60ft tower, a dual-element folded dipole was installed, with fresh feedline.  A 2M rig was purchased, and wired up to an old TNC from the Packet days, a Pakrat 242.  Carlo, VA3CSS, donated a Toshiba P3 notebook which still had actual Serial and Parallel ports on it.  (Good luck finding one of them today!)  A free download of UIView32 and some tweaking by Chris, VE3ZO, and VA3SWO-1 was on the air serving Southwestern Ontario and Southeastern Michigan.

The Digipeater has run flawlessly since then, other than the normal power outages.  It's survived all the spring storm seasons since that time, occasionally needing a reboot of the computer.  The one problem was the original TNC couldn't handle the duty cycle of the digipeater.  It would often run fine for half a day or less, then just lock up, or start running at a different baud rate.

In 2010, a new TNC was purchased, which is a model being used by other APRS Digipeaters without issue.

Just this month, March of 2012, the hard drive on the notebook finally died.  (not bad for a ten-year-old notebook with it's original hard drive!  :) )  A replacement was installed, and the software re-installed from backup.  The Digipeater was only down for a day, and only because I was very busy the day it failed!

Today, we completed the move to take the entire setup off the electrical grid.  It now runs entirely off of a deep-cycle battery, which will soon be paralleled with another deep-cycle battery in the very near future, to increase the runtime.

Here's a complete list of the current setup:

• Kenwood TM-241A 2M rig
• Toshiba 4260DVD Pro notbook computer running Windows XP
• Kantronics Packet Communicator 3 TNC
• the latest, (last) version of UI-View32
• A deep-cycle battery, with a 116mins runtime at full output
• An automatic 2A / 4A battery maintainer

Here's some photos of the setup:

You can see in the picture above, a second laptop on the left. It's an older model than the one in use, which is on the right, but it is sufficient for this purpose also. That's our spare computer.

The power supply is no longer in use, since the switchover to deep-cycle battery, but still sits there beneath the setup, ready to go, if AC is available.

You can see the deep-cycle battery on a wooden tray on the floor.  The tray is on rollers, for easy access.  The automatic charger / maintainer is on the wall to the right, in orange.  Beside it is a terminal block that all the connections for the battery, the TNC, the rig and the PC are made.  A quick disconnect will be added to the power supply.  That will make switching from the battery to the 20A power supply as easy as unplugging the battery and plugging in the PS.

Behind the notebook on the left, is the original black AC power adapter for the laptop.  We have a spare of that too, and if there is AC available, we can simply plug that back in also.  There are two batteries for that laptop, but neither holds much of a charge anymore.  Not surprising, given their age, but it does give us enough time to unpug the lead from the deep-cycle and quickly plug in the AC adapter.

There you have it!  The complete VA3SWO-1 APRS Digipeater setup, serving a large chunk of SE Michigan and SW Ontario, and completely off the power grid!