APRS drill recap and emergency alerting presentation

March 21 APRS coverage drill — recap

The March drill put two member-built iGates on the air at fixed mountaintop sites — Scott Sheppard (KJ4ZZB) on Stone Mountain and John DeRoo (K4VER) on Arabia / Bradley Mountain — with a handful of mobile and portable stations driving routes across DeKalb County to test how well their packets were heard. The drill was followed by a discussion thread on the DeKalb ARES Groups.io that ran for several days; this section summarizes what came out of it.

What worked

• Both fixed iGates digipeated lots of traffic. Per Facundo (KK4ODA): “the two iGates (KJ4ZZB and K4VER) digipeated lots of our packets.” Reception from Stone Mountain in particular was, in Scott’s words, “fabulous” — to the point that the volume of beacons was high enough that stations were occasionally stepping on each other.
• The Stone Mountain digipeater later picked up portable stations. Tom (KE4QCM) reported his Stone Mountain digipeater (KE4QCM-10) successfully relayed both KK4ODA-9 RF and the K4VER-1 RF digipeater later in the afternoon, validating the relay path.
• APRS.fi tracks confirmed coverage. Mobile tracks for KK4ODA-5 (cell) and KK4ODA-9 (RF) showed clean coverage across the routed segments, even with some early-exercise hardware issues.

What didn’t — and the lessons that came out of it

• Several mobile -9 stations weren’t heard on RF. Scott observed that some operators using -9 callsigns were probably not configured correctly to actually transmit on RF — APRS cell apps (APRS.FI on iPhone, APRSDroid on Android) are easy to mistake for RF participation when they’re really cell-only.
• Hardware issues hit several operators. Tom had GPS / antenna problems that kept his RF signal weak until he was near Stone Mountain. Facundo had hardware trouble that broke the early part of his RF track. Common thread: there were too many “first time using this gear in anger” moments.
• Beaconing intervals were too aggressive. The volume of traffic at Stone Mountain suggests members had their beaconing intervals set too short. The right defaults are smart-beaconing while moving and 5-minute beacons when stationary.

Action items going forward

Distilled from the threads:

1. Pre-drill RF check at the next monthly meeting. Scott proposed bringing every APRS-capable HT and mobile to the parking lot for a ~5-minute-per-radio configuration test before the next exercise — the cheapest possible way to catch the configuration problems that wasted half a Saturday on March 21.
2. Anytone 878 UV II Plus owners: upgrade firmware to R 4.0. A user found that this firmware level fixed GPS issues that were breaking APRS configuration on the previous version.
3. Carry a backup antenna. Tom’s main lesson learned. Antenna failure or bad mounting was responsible for a noticeable share of the missing-on-RF stations.
4. Plan for a permanent receive-only iGate at Stone Mountain. Scott raised this idea explicitly — given how well Stone Mountain heard the drill traffic, a permanent receive iGate would significantly improve coverage for public-service events like the Peachtree Road Race and the Atlanta Track Club marathon season. (This idea materialized into the W4BOC-1 deployment that went permanent on April 20 — see the W4BOC-1 activation entry.)
5. Climbing logistics for portable iGate deployments. John raised the practical side of carrying a 25-lb pack (battery, 50W mobile, carbon-fiber mast, J-pole, etc.) to a mountaintop site. Stone Mountain is doable but slick when wet; freezing temps and high-summer heat each pose their own problems. Recommendations: split equipment between two climbers, cache gear at the top, plan for weather contingencies. He also raised whether Cobb ARES has a playbook for using Kennesaw Mountain in similar circumstances.

Emergency alerting presentation

The second half of the meeting was a presentation by Vicki Karnes, RN, DCES, on emergency alert notification systems — covering NOAA Weather Radio, the wireless emergency alert system on cellphones, and how those channels integrate with multi-channel alerting at the county and individual level. A useful framing for ARES operators thinking about how their own situational awareness fits into a wider public-warning ecosystem.

Looking ahead

Members discussed a follow-up drill in May 2026 that builds on the March results — see the Ideas for May Drill discussion on Groups.io for the working draft of that exercise design.