Over the past few months I have been running an APRS digipeater/i-gate off of my Yaesu FTM-6000R which used to be my primary mobile radio. I was recently able to install an external antenna, specifically the Diamond X30A, along with LMR-400 coax to the radio. Until now I was running off of a N9TAX rollup j-pole antenna, that while usable, didn’t really give too much range. But now with the new antenna I have significantly increased the receive range of my digipeater.

For the software side of things, the station is being run off of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W running Dire Wolf, and is connected to the radio using a DigiRig interface. Dire Wolf handles both digipeating and i-gate duties, and has proven to be very stable and reliable even on the relatively limited hardware of the Pi Zero. Initial setup of Dire Wolf was very straightforward, and once set up the system has required no hands-on maintenance with over 6 months of constant runtime.

Since upgrading the antenna, the improvement hasn’t just been visible on paper, but very noticeable in actual use. When operating with HTs previously, there were several consistent dead zones where packets would either fail to get through or be decoded very intermittently. After moving to the X30A, the vast majority of those dead zones have effectively disappeared. The station has also been able to reliably hit nearby digipeaters and i-gates that were previously only reachable under very ideal conditions. What was once extremely intermittent connectivity has become consistent enough to be predictable, which is exactly what you want from an always-on APRS station.

Projected APRS digipeater receive coverage after antenna upgrade

(notes replace placeholder image with an image of antenna with sunset? background)