Active Projects

As a group, we are interested in many areas centred around communications, these include:

Maintenance of our control trailer. Recently we stripped it, and re-wired everything. This has been very successful, and we are now considering further improvements such as solar panels to charge the on-board batteries.

We have been trialing a new piece of software which allows planned events to be fully defined in advance with routes, maps and operators, and then used for logging, time recording, DMR message logging, and position reports via APRS or DMR. This wil be made available in the Play Store when we consider it as stable.

Increasing our use of modern technology as well as removing any single points of failure. We recently moved to DMR, and have been experimenting with cross band repeaters to either fill coverage gaps or provide alternative options. We have also used cellular push to talk radios for some events to ensure we always have good comms.

The High Peak Trail walk we cover is always a challenge for communications, so we are looking into linking multiple DMR repeaters using microwave links (possibly AREDN) to improve event coverage, and in the future possibly building a cross Derbyshire digital communication network using the same technology.

We are starting to document some of our project updates here.