Rusty's Blog

And I’ve determined at least part of what’s wrong with my APRS stuff in my car.

No, I won’t go into what APRS is, beyond saying it’s part of the amateur radio hobby. If you have found my blog, and you have questions, there are loads of resources that will tell you more than I am about to say. So go search and find. As some might say, the truth is out there.

In my car there’s a link from under my dash, to the trunk that provides a power conduit for my APRS tracker, gps and radio. A couple of months ago, the fuse blew. I replaced it, and it blew again. That can only mean a couple of things, neither of them really good.. Either something in my dash was blowing the fuse, or something in the  trunk, or on the way to the trunk. Sinc that was easier to ‘fix’, by clipping the lead to the trunk, I did that, replaced the fuse again, and happy dash. So something on the way to, or in the trunk is being a problem.

On rading how to get my position to show up for SkyWarn this week, and noticing the interest in possible watcher’s for this evening, I decided that today was the day to find and fix whatever is wrong with the APRS stuff in my trunk. And I may yet get something ‘working,’ though at the apparent expense of a radio that I wasn’t planning on replacing. Well, that’s why you make plans, so that life can alter them. Right?

Troubleshooting. Check the wire to the trunk. Not shorted between the leads. good conductivity end to end. Check.

APRS tracker? Check that’s working.

Spare battery from the trunk to power up the radio?  Well, not the best, but we’ve got something to work with. Check.

Plug the battery into the distribution system, Dead battery. Hmm. Ok, only thing I haven’t checked here separately was the radio. Pop the power cable for that off the distribution block. check draw across the leads, Short. Ok, that looks like where my problem is. What am I going to have to do to solve? Well, quick solution would be to hang the connector off a different radio, except that the connection for the APRS tracker to the radio was a custom job. I’ll just have to creat another custom I guess. So what radio? Well, the Quick and dirty solution is to use another radio already mounted in the trunk. It has the advantage of being right there. The disadvantage is that the wiring for the mike is diferent. And from a quick look at the drawings of the two connectors, while I could probably cobble together a quick sollution, that’s not the ‘right’ thing to do.

Why not? Well, that radio is in the trunk for a specific reason. That reason has nothingto do with APRS, and I don’t want to break things that way. So, using that radio is ‘out.’ Even if it is possible.

Long term I want a different radio in there any way, and now is the time to build that up. Of course now I have to dig up the specs for setting that radio up for APRS. That’s not particularly difficult, as I have already done some stuff like that, it’s just going to take a bit of soldering, and waiting until I have a connector of the appropriate type for that radio. There is one already here some place, and I’ll spend a bit of time looking yet tonight, but I suspect that I will have to wait till I can gt to the hardware store tomorrow for the final solution. We’ll see.

More to follow.