APRS test from Stone Tower in Montpelier, VT

During a small road trip through Montpelier and Burlington VT Jen and I decided to stop at Hubbard park to go for a walk and try some radio nerdery. I failed to get pictures on the beautiful snowy walk through the park, but it was wonderful and near sunset. I ended up trying to use my Yaesu VX-6R and Mobilinkd TNC3+ to send position reports, and was ultimately successful from the top of the tower we climbed.

As you can see from the screenshots above I was able to receive a bunch of stations from the tower and was able to get out a position report as well as some SMS messages via SMSGTE. Oddly I never got ACKs for my messages, but I did get a reply from SMSGTE as expected when using the “?” after the destination call. The previous messages were from tests.

As you see from the screenshots I did finally have some success sending messages from the VX-6R, but it’s not as reliable as I’d like. There’s some work left to go. As a side note I did eventually get some bi-directional messages going through SMSGTE that aren’t shown in this screenshot with Kevin, K7AJK. With enough elevation I was able to overcome the shortcomings of this setup. In the screenshots my call is K7JLX-15 and the icon I’m using is a red “X”.

A woman stands in front of a low stone wall overlooking leafless trees and mountains in the distance with a mostly clear sky. A handheld radio and some parts are laying on the stone wall behind her.
On top of the tower with Jen looking north.