Adventioneering

KB3EEE recently took advantage of my “you break it, you bought it” policy to purchase my trusty VX-7R. This left me without a radio, and in late 2008 Yaesu had come out with a new radio with bluetooth (if you bought the extra thing) and ARPS/GPS (if you bought the extra thing) and a decent battery (if you bought it).

I liked the VX-7 ownership experience a lot, except for that part that it took me a month to learn all the nonsensical key combinations required to operate it. I joked that I had learned Japanese because it seemed that you would have to actually be Japanese in order to understand the logic that went into the menu interface. But over time you do begin to sort of understand the sick twisted reasoning of it all and the radio began to make sense, even though you couldn’t explain it to anybody else.

I was looking at some other Kenwoods and asked Bryan (KE5KOA) rhetorically if I wanted another fiddly Japanese radio. He pointed out that I had already learned Japanese, and so with that inarguable logic, I purchased the VX-8. One of the few nice things about being in the Boston area is we have a HRO in decent proximity, unlike Seattle where you have to drive to Portalnd, Oregon.

The joke turned out to be on me when I realized that they switched a lot of the buttons and special tricks around on the VX-8. It’s still Japanese logic – but a new and exciting dialect! Particularly interesting is the fact that there is not a dedicated volume or channel knob; one knob does both duties but obviously only one thing at a time.

The interesting think of course about the VX-8R is that it includes a APRS TNC built-in. For once, and I know this must have made some bean-counter at Vertex Standard shed a tear, it is actually included and functional in the base price. Sort of. Without the GPS module and associated weird adapter, you lose the ability to have the position memories function (which seems like a paradox), but I can attest that ARPS does seem to work great.

This was the first time I have operated this mode and I was surprised that I was able to fill up 40 stations with of position reports within five or ten minutes. I set my position lat/long manually and was also surprised when I magically appeared on the Internet, just as advertised.

I know there are lots of fancy automatic Internet position reporting things for consumers (such as google and yahoo’s beta offerings), which rely on convinient, affordable, and reliable cellular phone technology. APRS really was the original, and has a real place, particularly in back-country work where you can coordinate the positions of multiple stations without any coordinating controllers. There’s even a practical use for this for yuppies: Burning Man.

And without any further ado, my current ARPS position.