My APRS parcel of bits arrived today. We were out this morning when the postie came past so this afternoon I went for a drive with Luca to the local post office.

Now to see what damage we can do!

APRS tracker I ordered has shipped, now tracking via USPS 🙂

Today I ordered some APRS gear from Scott at Argent Data, looks like some of it is on backorder 🙁

Should be fun to get back into APRS, I used to enjoy it a lot and it looks like a number of cool things are now available since I last used APRS about 8 years ago.

Because I’m not using an optimal antenna (actually far from it) I recently purchased an antenna tuner. I ended up getting an LDG Z-100 which is a nice small compact unit that goes well with my Yaesu FT 857D.

After reading reviews I ended up ordering direct from the US and saved myself about $80 compared to a local purchase, it’s always nice to save some cash 🙂 The unit took about 5 days to arrive and I haven’t had a great deal of time to give it a good work out, however initial testing shows it works a treat.

In the backyard I have the small G5RV at around head height, with the tuner in line I can now use prety much any band.

This afternoon I managed to put my newly acquired G5RV up. It’s on a wooden pole at 8ft in the centre and about 6 feet at the ends. Just fits inside the backyard 🙂

It’s not ideal, will have to get it up permanently somehow in a better position but I can hear tons more on it than the previous setup already.

15mins after I put it up I had my first contact on 20m with Ken J07CVU in Sendai, Northern Japan. Looks like I might have fun!