APRS "Voice-Alert"

Last weekend I took a trip to Southern Utah and did my best to follow the wilderness protocol and generally make use of the National 2M Simplex Frequency (146.520Mhz). I made a contact with a soccer dad on the way down through Utah County, a jeep fan near Moab, a couple more people in Utah County on the way up and a few people in Cache Valley as we came back home. In retrospect that sounds pretty good, but there was a lot of dead air in response to my CQ's over the four days, most notably in the areas without repeater coverage.

I noticed on the APRS site, http://eng.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/aprs.html, an idea about using CTCSS tone encode and squelch on the APRS frequency (144.390Mhz) to let others know you are monitoring that frequency.

Instead of turning your volume all the way down on your APRS radio/channel, you use CTCSS squelch of 100Hz to mute your speaker for digipeated traffic or any other APRS traffic that isn't encoded (monitored).

When you are monitoring the frequency you turn on CTCSS tone encode of 100Hz so that others monitoring the frequency know you are listening and within simplex range when the APRS system beacons.

http://nwp.ampr2.net/nwaprs/VoiceAlert

Generally I think that CTCSS on a simplex frequency is a bad thing. This use is a clever exception.

I don't have the capability to do APRS yet, but even so I am planning on adding the channel to my radio to scan for tone encoded traffic. Maybe I'll get another QSO or two this way.