APRS @ 5W with the Yaesu FTM-400DXR Part 2

I took the family to Mt Gambier, SA for Christmas.

A great time to really test out the the FTM-400XDR and see how APRS would work at 5watts (the limitation of my license being 10w, but this radio not having a 10w power increment).

The journey to the border:

Looking back at the tracking (using aprsdirect.com), I appear to have lost contact between Coleraine and Casterton. Not entirely surprising. Fairly hilly country, but once I hit that, that's where the journey tracking ended.

Crater Lake in Mount Gambier taken from Potters Point (because taking a Blue Lake photo is a bit predictable)

The journey back:

We took a detour back home, and my expectations were exceeded.

The journey was recorded just inside the Victorian border, with the signal getting from Strathdownie to a repeater all the way over in the Grampians. 

Our detour was from Casterton out to Merino, then on to Hamilton. Merino is surrounded by hills, and the elevation is fairly low. Surprisingly, the APRS signals were making it to the same repeater in the Grampians. As we climbed out of the valley that Merino is hidden in, channel A was scanning repeaters, and picking up traffic from a Mt Gambier repeater that is actually located about 50km the other side of the city. Not bad - over 100km away at this point. A little broken due to terrain, but still, impressive enough. After a while, the traffic from the Mt Gambier repeater was replaced with the beacon from a Portland repeater.

The tracking followed us all the way back home, bar the last couple of blocks given I covered them before it pinged again, and turned the radio off. 

All things considered, even at 5 watts, the APRS performance was a lot better than expected. Merino is a bit "middle of no where", especially if you take the goat track that leads you from Merino to the Hamilton-Digby road. That whole area of Western Victoria looks OK on a map - but the reality is that the locations are hardly "towns" - even Merino lost it's "town" status and is now a village. Entire places on the map around it consist of 1 or 2 farms and a sign post. There really isn't "that much" out there. It's really just farm land.

It was really quite surprising. I was however amused to find another tracking site I used showed only a fraction of the journey - it seems to have lost me less than 100km from home on the journey toward the border. It pays to know which site to use I guess.

Summary:

300km journey. 275km of that is to the Victorian border. It appears to have tracked us successfully for about 260km of that, with the bulk of the journey using a single repeater in the Grampians, across a section of the state that has a population totaling less than 50,000 people once we get leave the greater Ballarat area. Quite simply, it works. I suspect I may have been able to make the entire journey with a little more power. The area where we lost and regained APRS is flat farmland, so it would seem to be more a power vs distance issue than a terrain issue. 

Certainly for south western Victoria though it's a workable system even at low power.