Tuesday nights are K3IR nets, and because I still haven't moved my 2m antenna up into the attic, for a more permanent setup, I pulled it over into the front bedroom a few hours early, and got YAAC running, sending out beacons. Everything was in the "same" place, but for some reason, it behaved differently.
Initially, YAAC sent the beacon at 1 minute intervals, and APRS.fi saw them fine, but YAAC didn't. I believe that YAAC reports what it hears over the air, which means whatever local digipeaters are echoing. Which means I was sending but not receiving? After maybe 15 min of hearing nothing, I checked on the radio, the feed line, the antenna; all seemed fine. And it started working. Did I move something just enough? Do I have a loose connection somewhere?
My "desired" operating position is for RasPi to be in hamshack, and for me to be either on the couch downstairs, or at least in my recliner on the other side of the hamshack, with Direwolf or FT8 on RasPi, and YAAC or GridTracker (respectively) running on Win10. So that much is working nicely so far, at least for the DW/YAAC pair, as well as TightVNC letting me poke at RasPi without having to trudge upstairs as often.
So for a few hours, I (watched TV, and) poked occasionally at YAAC. It's mildly annoying that when you start YAAC first (before DW), it complains loudly, and doesn't appear to let you then start DW and retry the connection. 1st world problems, I suppose, to need to close YAAC and reopen, but then maybe I'm just missing a button. (Looks like you can click the RF button, top center, and Enable Port; will try that next time I mess up ;).
And speaking of missing buttons, I'd been mostly watching the Raw Packets window last time, and did overlook the Station/Object List, but found that and like it. I'm still trying to find a way to get DW's expanded display of individual packets, but in YAAC; raw is ok, to know what you're seeing and from whom, but YAAC doesn't display it in any humanly readable form. Again, 1st world problems.
I've been talking about packet to club folks via our email list, and knew of one guy who typically runs APRSISCE. Seeing him on APRS.fi, I tried sending a message, and APRS.fi heard 2 of the 3 send attempts, but I got no reply, and an hour later he was off the air. Will try again another day.
Once club's 2m net started, I shut YAAC off and switched 8900 over to voice, but then realized that with dual operating bands, I could continue to receive digital into DW, while I listened to the net. I flipped (from APRS on 144.390) over to 145.030, and after a couple of minutes saw K3IR's ID from WinLink, then tuned 145.010 and saw a handful of other messages and idents. So there is packet in the area, and close enough for me to hear, which is encouraging.
Up next will be to try to connect to one of these other stations. WinLink is on my radar, especially as club has a node already running. I had previously mistakenly thought that WinLink was proprietary, Windows-only, and paid-only; turns out there are multiple open source implementations that run fine on Linux. And by coincidence, the latest ARES letter mentioned a WL net that covers PA. So yeah, I'll be looking into that some more.
Beyond that, I'm still wanting to find local BBS's, and re-learn what I used to know back in the early 90's, as far as connecting to distant stations via multiple hops. Too much fun, not enough time! XD
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