I found I can mute the dedicated APRS channel on my Btech UV-Pro to never make a sound, so I can listen to the 2 dual-watch channels without needing to hear digital squawks.
The UV-Pro already had a feature to mute what it recognizes as digital signals, but that always takes a moment to activate it. I don’t know how that’s useful at all.
The RT-880G has this feature, and it got me thinking and reading manuals.
I have the new Pixel 10 Pro XL, so I needed to setup Winlink again. I purchased WOAD this time from Play store, and signed up for access to the beta. Previously, I had installed the downloaded APK. One can export sessions from old WOAD, but there’s no way to import it into my new phone.
I’m having trouble getting a node
that reliably does Winlink.
K3IR seems to fail to connect
and complete the transaction.
I could use the BBS nodes
at KA3TKW and W3CRS.
Just watching packets
on 145.010 shows some advertisements
of services on nodes: Winlink, BBS, and mail
I got the BTech UV-PRO back on Friday, 2025-07-18. This one has a different serial number, so very quick replacement. I restored the configuration from the HT app on my phone. The new radio is seen on https://aprs.fi/ again and I occasionally see APRSDroid report that it’s been digipeated by a nearby node. I tested the transmit power to be 4.8W with the small meter. Power was previously not detected at all by the meter.
I further tested my UV-PRO to find it was transmitting less than 250mW when set to 5W. I compared it to another radio using a nearby tinySA. I RMA-ed it and mailed it back to BTech for repair or replacement.
I joined the APRS Thursday HOTG (Hams of the Gram) net.
I checked in by sending: ANSRVR CQ HOTG good Thursday morning.
I guess it sent 117 messages to others,
and for the 12 hours I was subscribed,
I received 174 HOTG messages to my callsign
from stations across the US and around the world.
APRSDroid
would often fail to reconnect to the UV-PRO:
java.io.IOException: read failed, socket might closed or timeout, read ret: -1
The HT
app would manage to reconnect OK.
I would need to cycle power on the radio to get APRSDroid
to reconnect.
In APRSDroid,
Preferences->Connection Preferences->Channel was set to 1.
I blanked that channel setting,
and now it may be reconnecting
between stop and start of app,
bluetooth,
or distance.
As a side note, having the UV-PRO monitoring a frequency other than APRS may interfere with packet reception. I don’t see as many APRS packets when monitoring another repeater, probably due to interruptions from the non-APRS audio.
I recently added winlink
back to my APRS ping
on the UV-PRO.
I immediately got a message from a Winlink gateway
that I had 1 new Winlink message waiting.
For the full RF experience,
I fired up KISS on the UV-PRO
and a session
to K3IR’s Winlink gateway (145.030kHz)
and checked my Winlink mail
over the radio.
I needed to be careful to not let HT app start and re-enable “digital mode”. When “digital mode” is enabled, it would switch to APRS 144.390MHz every time WoAD would TX, and that doesn’t work. The hint was seeing APRS traffic in the WoAD log while waiting for my Winlink session to initialize.
The email was KC3WRY, Matthew, playing around sending Winlink via APRS. I acknowledged and responded to his message.
I caught word that ISS was passing in a moment, so I tuned UV-PRO to 145.825MHz, the APRS digipeater on ISS. I heard packets from Pittsburgh, PA; Smyrna, DE, and Atlanta, GA. I tried to ping out my location a couple times, but it looked unheard according to https://ariss.net/.
The HT app presented the firmware update right away upon launching, so now I know it can do the upgrade. The first time I updated the radio, I used the older “BTech Programmer” app.
The update promises some fixes around
ack in in-built APRS,I discovered in the app the setting: Radio -> ID Settings -> 3 Checkboxes (ID, Location, Check) could be turned off to get to “none” to disable post-TX noises, which is “PTT Release” in the radio.
Those settings kept getting synced from the app to the radio, so now they’re set the way I want it to stay. I could have also disabled “Synchronous Signal Settings” in the app, but the mismatch seems like it would have been confusing.