Reason behind no video from Ripon rally, and a bit more on the APRS front

As you know I visited the Ripon rally last week, and got some video footage while there, however on final editing and looking at the footage I felt it was not up to my usual standard, partly down to there being far too many people in a small space not allowing me to film properly, so in the end I scrapped the idea, as the Blackpool rally is at a much larger venue and has more to offer I will of course do some filming there and I also have an opportunity to play more radio from Blackpool including, if my non-Baofeng radios don't suffer like the Baofeng radios would, from the top of Blackpool tower, watch this space.

Another thing I learned about APRS thanks to Carl 2E0EZT was that APRS has a "bulletin" feature, by which you can post bulletins simply by sending a message to "BLN*" (where * can be anything), these bulletins will show up on aprs.fi, and looking at this there appears to be little use of it in the UK, I tested this from my -5 using my mobile phone direct into the APRS-IS though it can be done through a radio over RF on the APRS frequency (the frequency differs by country, check what yours is, in the UK and Europe it is 144.800MHz), I may use the bulletin feature when I am operating portable, including from the Blackpool tower (though I don't have an APRS enabled HT so I'd have to rely on using an Android device, my Radio-Tone RT3 or my phone being the two obvious choices here, though I am saving for a Yaesu FT2D (as these are not cheap) and aim to have one hopefully before Hamfest 2019, and hopefully by which time I'll also have a full licence and be able to obtain the correct NoV in order to run a fully unattended igate so I can do HT based APRS properly and so can others around the area that use APRS.

So hopefully I can get a bit more serious with the APRS side of Amateur radio as it is still extremely useful in this era of mobile phones.

73 de 2E0EIJ