Tracking Ground Teams

[Dragoon]

TO be honest, status board, colored stickies on a wall map, and mandatory hourly check-ins (that include position updates) has worked fine for us.

I've seen many wings that don't really track teams.  They send them out, and ask them to call in hourly to prove their still alive, but otherwise don't care where they are.  And that's all that's required by the GBD tasks.   Not good - makes it hard to make decisions about redirecting deployed assets as the situation changes.

[CAP.is.1337]

I was just thinking about this!!!

How hard would it be to take a TinyTrak, hook it up to a GPS one end, and one of our unused HT1000 on a separate frequency, and there you have it! At least it's a proof of concept. It would probably be best to run it through some scrambling/encryption module to keep anyone from snooping.

See http://byonics.com/tinytrak/ for inspiration.

[isuhawkeye]

Great in theory.

Iowa had a group putting this together, unfortunately the guys at NHQ "Tech" told us that since it was not encrypted we couldn't do it.  (Il try to dig up the e-mail and share it.

However Illinois had a great APRS system running for quite some time.

[CAP.is.1337]

My guess is that APRS won't work with P25.

What you could do is not encrypt the whole transmission, but alter the GPS data being sent in a way that only someone with the correct algorithm can decode it.

[SARMedTech]

TO be honest, status board, colored stickies on a wall map, and mandatory hourly check-ins (that include position updates) has worked fine for us.

I've seen many wings that don't really track teams.  They send them out, and ask them to call in hourly to prove their still alive, but otherwise don't care where they are.  And that's all that's required by the GBD tasks.   Not good - makes it hard to make decisions about redirecting deployed assets as the situation changes.

Not to mention the safety, well-being and overall health level of the team.

[fireplug]

Can't use amateur radio for CAP missions; and as noted can't use digital modulations in the new radio system. So no slow-scan TV, either.

Those radio/GPS systems are alive and well in the HAM community.  In radio it is referred to as (APRS) Automatic Position Reporting System

Here is a great APRS tracking web site

[CAP.is.1337]

Would it be possible to use the same tech as the Garmin Rino to send coordinates under the voice comms?