Recommendations for off-road communications equipment or platforms?

[dreadlocks]

Yeah I find APRS is super useful for overlanding, and very reliable.. I've spent months traveling western US w/aprs beacon broadcasting and very rarely found any considerable areas where I was not able to get out packets.. I always got someone behind following my progress, and since I dont have any itinerary of when/where I'll be all they need to do is ensure I'm still moving and broadcasting, if everything goes silent for an unreasonable amount of time I expect S&R to start looking for me sooner or later..

However overlanding/expo's is not what attracted me to APRS, I got into it for High Altitude/Space packet radio and then realized hey, if I set this up on my expeditions I wont have to find a cell signal every few days or really plan/coordinate my check-in times to keep my mom, sister, and wife from calling in the calvary.

Ability to send/receive SMS messages is nice, if someone goes into town they can still communicate with camp even tho its waaay out of Line of Sight.. Came in really handy once when my brother got 2 flat tires trying to find me, he got a ride back to town and txt'd me he was waiting for AAA so I was able to go get him and figure out what was going on.. otherwise he'd of been 5h late and we'd of been clueless.. I unloaded all his camp gear and he had camp all setup and ready when he finally got in late that night.

Now that my oldest is learning to ride his motorcycle, another application is going to be coming up and thats going to be tracking both me and my son's bikes from my base-camp toy hauler.. we're both just going to have a simple radio with an arrow pointing at eachother's position incase we get split up, or someone has to ride back to camp solo to get parts/tools and leave the other behind on the trail.. Most of Rampart trails are extremely well covered by the Digi on Devils Head tower, which incidentally my home station iGates most of its packets since I got a clear LoS to Devils Head.

 

[craig333]

Perhaps I don't understand it well enough. I'm traveling solo most of the time so I have no need to know where anyone else is and no one is particularly interested in knowing where I am. Seems like most of what you're accomplishing could be done with simply getting on the radio and asking someone where or what. If someone really needs to get in touch with me they can always message my inreach if I'm out of cell range.

 

[dreadlocks]

Getting on the radio and knowing who is within range and what channels they are monitoring would result in better likelihood of making contact.. my radio I can sort by closest to me and anyone advertising a frequency/tone they are monitoring is just one click away.. there's even some repeaters nearby with beacons advertising their presence and settings, so joining those are just one click away, going to a area you never been before and just monitoring the traffic can give you a pretty darn good idea what infrastructure exists and how to access it... You can also set up voice alert to know when an APRS user is within simplex range and many other very nice features that make HAMing it up on the road so much easier, with less button pounding through menus trying to get setup correctly.