I just got back from a lovely vacation in Maui. I though it would be fun to bring my VHF/UHF radio along in case I got some free time to listen in, join a net, or do some APRS monitoring.
Long story short, I ended up having about 15 minutes free one night and had some fun checking in on the APRS traffic. Among others, I managed to snag a signal from 100 miles away in O‘ahu which was a surprise (we were both pretty high up on our respective islands)
What I did to prepare: I programmed my radios using CHIRP the repeaters for Maui as well as some specific linked repeaters from the XO group. I printed out the map from the XO group as well
See https://www.kh6rs.com/blog/xo-group-statewide-repeater-system
I also printed out the very nice Maui repeater map from https://www.kh6rs.com/repeaters.html
When I had free time late at night the repeaters were quiet and I didn’t want to wake anyone up!
If I did this again I’d want to bring a bluetooth APRS dongle and use my smartphone for mapping and messaging instead of just my VX-8R. I don’t have the GPS module for my VX-8R so I need to hand program in my location which is helpful for figuring out how far the signals I receive are away from me, and would be useful to plot my location if I decided to transmit it.
I’d also look at POTA and SOTA since everyone in the local radio club in SF told me that I _should_ have done that!
At the end of our trip were were starting to have some quiet days which might have given me some free time to play radio, but since our travel mates caught COVID we decided to go home a couple days early so if we got sick as well, we’d be back home.
All in all, a beautiful place for a vacation!
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