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- USING APRS FOR DIRECTION FINDING
-
- APRS is an ideal tool for rapidly triangulating fixes to locate a hidden
- transmitter or jammer. APRS instantly plots vectors from all stations making
- a signal report and the intersection of these lines of bearing indicates the
- location of the jammer. To see a sample, load the file named FOXDF.BK into
- APRS and see the results of our DF on a constant carrier on our local 145.05
- packet frequency. The bearings from W3ADO and W3DTN were actual measured
- beam headings. The third bearing from N3BFO was added to the file to show
- how great it would be if we had three stations reporting instead of just two.
-
- To accomplish this triangulation, each participating station simply
- enters his bearing to the jammer into his own station's course by hooking
- himself and using the INSert key to update his stations report. As soon as
- two or more stations are reporting a line of bearing to the jammer, everyone
- can predict the intersection of the lines by pressing the (J)ammer key. As
- a further aid, the R key can be used to superimpose a set of range rings on
- the screen for estimating distances for subjective analysis of signal
- strnegths. Even for stations not running APRS, their jammer bearings can be
- quickly entered by any other APRS station using the alt-A key to add them to
- the map in real time.
-
- Finally if a mobile fox-hunter is equiped with GPS or LORAN-C, his
- movements will also be tracked so that he can be vectored into the jammer's
- location.
-
- Eventually I want to add a signal strength contour display so that single
- stations can report simply their relative signal strength on the jammer, and
- intersecting circles from each station can also be used in the triangulation
- process. Feedback on this application of APRS is welcome.