Microwave Experimental Project - APRS Antenna Pointing 14 Nov 08 ------------------------------------------------------------------- I was approached by some microwave experimenters looking to use APRS for antenna alignment between stations. I recommended the following format: HEADER: CALLSIGN>APMEPx,WIDE1-1: =DDMM.mmN/DDDMM.mmW\CSE/SPD/BRG/NRQ/FFF.FFFMHz ATV-MEP You will recognize this as the APRS DF BEARING report format. The advantage of using this format is that all APRS clients already should plot these antenna bearings on the map, and no one is using the DF bearing format as much as we had hoped years ago. Where BRG is the antenna bearing 001 to 360 Where NRQ is 3 digits.... Set N=9 Where R is Range encoded as R^2 (4=16mi etc) Where Q is Quality or beamwidth. 9 = 1 degree wide 8 = 2 degree 7 = 4 degree 5 = 8 degree 4 = 16 degree 3 = 32 degree 2 = 64 degree 1 = 128 degree 0 = OMNI I am surprised that I cannot find NRQ defined in the APRS SPEC. (Maybe I didn't look hard enough) So I went back to my original docs PROTOCOL.TXT and DF.TXT but even they did not document the Q byte. Ill fix that by adding this to the APRS1.2 addendum: www.aprs.org/aprs12.html Of course FFF.FFFMHz is too small for microwave, but the Freq spec has defined additional characters so we have well defined formats for microwave. A96.000MHz would be 1296 MHz B20.000MHz would be 2320 MHz C01.000MHz would be 2401 MHz D01.000MHz would be 3401 MHz E51.000MHz would be 5651 MHz F60.000MHz would be 5760 MHz G30.000MHz would be 5830 MHz H01.000MHz would be 10,101 MHz I01.000MHz would be 10,201 MHz J68.000MHz would be 10,368 MHz K01.000MHz would be 10,401 MHz L01.000MHz would be 10,501 MHz M48.000MHz would be 24,048 MHz N01.000MHz would be 24,101 MHz O01.000MHz would be 24,201 MHz Etc Thanks Bob, WB4APR