| Hello gopher enthusiasts and passers-by. It's September, which | |
| means it is ROOPHLOCH [1] season! Unfortunately the month flew by, | |
| as it always seems to. Guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore. | |
| Regardless, this is a pretty low key entry. I'll expand a little | |
| more on the actual entry [2], which again used the APRS to gopher | |
| tailphlogger bashed together in Python. After slacking all year, I | |
| finally got around to sending message acknowledgements which will | |
| stop the APRS client from retrying upon receipt. Although I don't | |
| have any client that sends a message without requesting an | |
| acknowledgement, which would be nice to test so the program will | |
| only send an ack when requested. Anyways, I will clean up the code | |
| from all the flotsam from testing and debugging and will put it | |
| somewhere in case anyone else wants to poke at it. | |
| For the attempt itself, I tried sending a couple line entry via an | |
| HT strapped to my bag during an off road motorcycle trip, but I | |
| was either too far in the hole or too low power to be heard by a | |
| digipeater to send it along. The other attempt at low elevation | |
| and highway speeds also did not bear fruit. I probably could have | |
| climbed the hill and stood still long enough to get a good | |
| transmission, but I really wanted to test it in everyday and often | |
| suboptimal conditions. | |
| A test via the cell network did show that the tailphlogger was | |
| still operational, so on the next attempt that is what I decided | |
| to use. I suppose the adage "two is one and one is none" holds | |
| water in this case. I will perform more tests with the HT and see | |
| how I can make it work more reliably. The topology of digipeaters | |
| have changed so I guess I'll just have to map out where I can get | |
| good signal to communicate once more. | |
| In the end, I still find it fun to play with the APRS system, and | |
| making these fun little widgets improve the utility of the network | |
| for me. Keeping the spirit alive for WB4APR (SK). | |
| Tags: #ROOPHLOCH #APRS #hamradio | |
| [0] Text-only version | |
| [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloc… | |
| [2] APRS tailphlogs |