[2026-06-06] VE8IR has very little experience with APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) and Packet Radio. He recalls VE7NB experimenting with this in the late 1980s - at least packet radio. Some of the local amateur radio operators here in Yellowknife have been experimenting with it for some time and have set up various receiving stations (IGates) linking to the Internet. Digital packets concerning position reports, weather data or whatever telemetry is of interest are sent to these stations and read by other local radios directly or through the Internet.
The device is a AVRT5 2 m transmitter based on an Arduino microcontroller with a built-in GPS. It is powered by a built-in lithium ion battery. It is of course at least 10 years old and therefore largely discontinued and obsolete. Yet it still works and functions. The figure above is a trace map from aprs.fi .
VE8SKI is also visible on this map, but not on the screenshot. It is a remote weather station at the local ski club. We can see the two digipeaters in the image - VE8WD-11 and VE8TEA. There is only one remote station shown, VE8IR-1 (the author). His care is not capable travelling over water, yet the map trace it look so. The most likely explanation is that the signals received by VE8TEA digipeater were reflections from the local topography. Note that the actual routes he took are not accurately depicted. The author has observed this when inspecting traces in British Columbia around the Trans-Canada Highway.
The Society encountered reflections with VHF work some years ago during a series of Fox Hunts. Signals were bounced off buildings (with directional antennas) to confuse direction finders. A less intentional aspect of this was observed when carrying out a fox hunt around Frame Lake. Signals would bounce off the cliff faces on the other side of the lake and make it appear as though the signals originated from across the lake, when in fact they did not. This phenomenon is of course the concept behind radio map construction (see article below), a subject of contemporary interest for digital signals and wireless networking.
We have come across this type of thing before. Reading up on waterfall plots and meteor scatter, we discovered that in an effort to detect reflections from ionized meteor trails, some amateurs had picked up reflections off of passing aircraft. As we studied the plot we realized that a math calculation could be applied to determine characteristics about the aircraft (i.e. Doppler shift) including its speed and quite possibly its direction. This is, of course, the principle behind Doppler radar.
The amateur radio service is intended not just for "rag chewing" (i.e. discussions about what cable to get or what antenna to erect or where one can find a certain pentode tube for that old radio) but also for education and experimentation.
Sources
- Xiucheng Wang, Yuhao Pan, et al, A Tutorial on Learning-Based Radio Map Construction: Data, Paradigms, and Physics-Awareness {arXiv:2603.17499 [eess.SY] https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.17499}
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_map