Last evening I did one more testing of the DiP-M without luck. The setup for this test was the following:
DiP-M
- Foxdigi with firmware from Cross Country Wireless
- TH-25AT Kenwood radio
- Solar charger SOL5N from Velleman
- 2x 7.2Ah 12V sealed batteries
- 1/4 wave antenna
Tracker
- Wouxun HT
- TT4
- 4x AA Battery pack
- Evermore GPS module
At first, the Tracker did manage to get to TF3RPF, which is a high level digi in Reykjavik. Then I reduced the power to 1W and it didn’t reach the digi. Then I set up DiP-M to beacon every minute, and see if it would reach to TF3RPF. That worked quite fine for some time. However, it never digipeated the packets from the tracker. I did however find out that the 2.5 mono jack and the 3.5 stereo jack did have some issues, I’d need to find better connectors for that.
As the pinout of the connector on the TT4 and the Foxdigi are compatible, I did test switching between TNCs. This gave me a very strange results. What happened was that the packets from the TT4 did get digipeated by TF3RPF and reached TF3RPG, but the Foxdigi’s did not. I did some research and noted that the tones of the Foxdigi are not really good. The upper 2200Hz tone is about 2236Hz and the lower tone is around 1150Hz. The TT4 did alot better than that. My conclusion must be that the Foxdigi is not at all well suited for this application.
I’ll be doing more tests and will keep posting about the progress.
