A Transparent APRS UIDigi Node near Youngsville, NC

This is one of area's APRS nodes, located near Youngsville NC. It's ID is WB4IUY. It currently consists of a Yaesu Memorizer, running about 5 watts into a 35 watt VHF power amplifier from Radio Shack, and a Kantronics KPC-3 TNC. The TNC uses the latest firmware and is UIDigi compatable. The TNC can be seen in the photo below on the left, as the top TNC in the stack. The APRS system is full time battery powered.

This digi is called transparent, as it doesn't show up on the local APRS maps as being an actual digi. The reason for this, is a terrain barrier to our west and north. The KQ4MS-3 digi in Zebulon hears to well from about 30 degrees to somewhere around 180 degrees. We would often loose contact with our APRS friends to the west and northwest. This digi is on a directional antenna, pointed northwest, and is used as a "go-between" to the KQ4MS-3 digi in Zebulon.

The node's primary antenna is a 15 element Cushcraft "Boomer". It's located at about 130 feet (about 505 feet above sea level), is vertically polarized, and pointed approximately west northwest. It's fed through about 170' of CQ-Flexi-4xl feedline. With this high-gain antenna system, low loss feedline, GaAsFet receive preamp at the rig, and good receive sensitivity, we seldom loose reception of signals from the west that are near or below the horizon.

Below is a picture of the tower that supports the antennas for the WB4IUY APRS node. You can see the antenna, it's the top yagi in the stack. The tower is pretty heavily loaded, but has made it through many storms and 2 hurricanes over the last few years.

Below is a typical map from DOS APRS. You'll notice some familiar callsigns in the map, including the little white house with the WB4IUY callsign...that's the location of the digipeater near Youngsville. This image was captured while I had my APRS map "zoomed in" pretty close. If I "zoom out" a bit, you can see the state of NC much better. Among other things, APRS is a neat mode to have keyboard to keyboard "chats" on with amateurs over a wide area.