As part of our efforts to identify an appropriate APRS digipeater platform for Athens area use, Ted (W8KVK) is prototyping (draft) UIDIGI-based firmware for review by the Steering Committee. This involves designing and programming an EPROM image for eventual 'burning' into a standard 256 Kbit EPROM. The finished EPROM will then be installed into a PacComm Tiny 2 Mark II TNC for on air testing.

Members of the Athens County Amateur Radio Association (http://ac-ara.org) have approved use of the Association callsign (W8UKE) for on-air tests, and the prototype digi will operate on 144.39 mHz as W8UKE-1.

User Commands are available by connecting directly to W8UKE-1. Since the system devotes nearly all its resources to un-connected digipeated traffic, there are only three User Commands available. These are: Info: which returns a short summary of the system location, purpose, power, etc., and the ACARA web site address. MHeard: returns a list of up to 100 most recently heard stations with timestamp. Useful for system performance and propagation monitoring. Quit: disconnects the user. Any other attempted command returns an error message and a forced disconnect.

Serial Port Support for external devices co-located with the digipeater is available, and will be enabled in our EPROM. Examples include a weather station, building alarm or temperature sensor, telemetry, etc. One example of a repeater site monitoring application is the Site Alert system from Australia. Output from such devices may then be formatted up for transmission as a standard APRS beacon over a sysop-definable path and time interval.

External Remote Control is also supported via the ability to remotely toggle both the STA and CON LED's on/off and separately to interrogate their current status. Since W8UKE-1 will rarely handle 'connected' traffic, these LED's are disabled in normal operation. Typical remote control applications would simply detect the LED voltage when toggled, and apply it to the device being controlled. This support will be enabled in our EPROM configuration.

For those interested in more technical information supporting the UIDIGI prototyping process, additional reference materials are available on the previous page.