APRS demonstrated for CASARA

 

At about 8:00 PM on Friday night, I received a call from Dave Martinuk, VE5RY in Humboldt asking if I could help demonstrate APRS on Saturday morning for the Humboldt division of CASARA, the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association.  After a brief discussion we decided the we would place an unattended tracker in the search aircraft and track it's movements at the simulated command post.  Now the fun began.  After building a bracket to mount a 1/4 wave antenna on a Cessna wing strut, I packed everything up and went to bed.

 

Once in Humboldt we set up the receiving station in the airport "terminal" and mounted the tracker, GPS and antenna on the airplane.  Once airborne, the CASARA representatives and I watched every movement of the aircraft including speed, direction and altitude in real time.  At one point the aircraft radio failed and the only way they knew the plane's location was via APRS.  In the afternoon we flew a simulated search pattern and we were once again impressed both at how the APRS system worked and how well the navigator and pilot followed the search pattern.

 

73 - Bruce - VE5BNC