ToddDubya
NES Member
I'm thinking about dabbling in APRS for my remote super secret squirrel hideaway. I'd like a small system that I can either run on batteries (that I could swap out every week or two if needed) or with solar, that will transmit weather data. Ideally I'd have a proper weather station, but maybe at first just do temperature and humidity and add other capabilities as needed. I'm pretty sure that location is close enough to the Greylock repeater (K1FFK) to get onto aprs.fi that way.
I know there are systems that you can connect to an HT like the beloved/maligned Baofeng but I can't run that for long on batteries. I'm thinking more like a dedicated transmitter like the Byonics Microtrak (Byonics - MicroTrak) which might do what I want. I'd need something to talk to it, perhaps an Arduino/RPi to read sensors and maybe even control the power to everything.
If this works, I'd REALLY like to add a way to measure snow depth since I was last there. This location can get a lot of snow, so it'd be nice to know if I need to drag the snowblower up there or not. A friend suggested a proximity sensor, which would be just about perfect. Set it at X feet above the ground, measure, X-measured = depth.
Anybody messed around with APRS, or even better done something like what I'm thinking? Am I barking up the wrong tree?
I know there are systems that you can connect to an HT like the beloved/maligned Baofeng but I can't run that for long on batteries. I'm thinking more like a dedicated transmitter like the Byonics Microtrak (Byonics - MicroTrak) which might do what I want. I'd need something to talk to it, perhaps an Arduino/RPi to read sensors and maybe even control the power to everything.
If this works, I'd REALLY like to add a way to measure snow depth since I was last there. This location can get a lot of snow, so it'd be nice to know if I need to drag the snowblower up there or not. A friend suggested a proximity sensor, which would be just about perfect. Set it at X feet above the ground, measure, X-measured = depth.
Anybody messed around with APRS, or even better done something like what I'm thinking? Am I barking up the wrong tree?