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A bit more on APRS and bicycles

Posted on August 7, 2013 by scott

My bike rig is a Kenwood TH72, which has APRS built-in. It’s essentially the handheld equivalent of the D710, which is a fine radio. Like the D710, it allows you to tweak the SmartBeaconing[r] settings. I spent a fair amount of time meddling with them, and learned two key lessons:

  1. There is absolutely no need to change the “corner pegging” settings. At all. The defaults work just as well for bikes as they do for cars.
  2. There is very little need to change the speed-based beaconing, but it sometimes helps.

The speed-based settings depend quite a bit on how you ride. When I’m on the road, I’m moving anywhere from 10 to 24 mph, depending on conditions. That’s fast enough to get inside the beaconing envelope, which by default bottoms out at 5 mph. With the default settings and the frequency of the turns on my usual routes, the default settings work.

If, however, you are a more casual biker, you might want to drop the bottom of the envelope from 5 mph to 2 mph. Below this, you beacon no more often than every 30 minutes, which might not be what you want for some situations. I’d leave the top end alone,  but I’ve had it set as low as 30 mph without issues. (Again, this setting was probably buried by the corner pegging.)

Of course, this is all for general use. See the previous post for what to do for events.

 

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