petehowell
Well Known Member
......are greatly exaggerated.
As previously posted, Kate and I made the roundtrip to see Grandma in South Bend this weekend. It was fine trip, great weather, good company, and a chance to say hey to Mom.
As usual, I checked the track Saturday night when we got home. All looked good except:
Apparently the RV-9A hyper-jump flux capacitor was working just fine. Notice the speed you Rocket-drivers..... Clearly something was amiss here. I checked the hit out in Cali and saw the url that was posted. Someone was trying to get my attention - and they did.
Clicking on the URL I could see I had become "almost famous" in a not so good way. Here are some excerpts:
"Emergency beacon called wide 1-1 today and its a plane, or using the plane symbol, thought I would let some know here as not sure if this is real or not. they are using the call also of n789ph i think.
any and all means for a emergency. any ideas?"
"There's a call in the comment field periodically - KD0CVN. Same guy as
the aircraft registration. Anyone called him yet?"
"Did some googling around, plane and unit might belong to:
*KD0CVN*
Peter D Howell
*
That beacon was over a residential area - if he was in trouble and went
down, we'll know soon enough."
"Has anybody called his residence ?"
"Called the airport - no answer.
Called FSS - no flight plan."
"Actually spoke to some folks from CAP. Gave them what I believed was the tailnumber at the time (now confirmed) along with last known coordinates from the beacon.
Guy I spoke to is a ham and knew what APRS is - he sent it up the chain."
"Last position (about 30 min ago) shows the plane in front of the hangar at the Anoka County airport. Presumably he'll be home soon. Google says it's about a 20 minute commute."
From here, cooler heads prevailed as they realized that I had landed in Niles and had headed back to Minne with Mom's oatmeal raisin cookies in tow. The techies started digging in and realized that there was a misconfigured digi on the ground in Belvidere, IL that took one of my packets and several from another tracker and showed them as emergency packets. Bob B, the inventor of APRS himself, even weighed in with the final explanation.
They might have gone a bit overboard with the calls, and I'm sure glad they did not call the house and tell Andi that Kate and I had gone down....but it was very nice to know they were watching and were ready to step in to take action. I corresponded with several of the guys, including Bob B and everything is cool. They are going to contact the digi operator and get his radio configured properly.
I think this accidental example continues to show the value of APRS in our planes. So if you need an antenna.........just kidding
P.S.
As for the no flight plan comment - I was in contact with ATC from 2 minutes after start up on the ground at Anoka, until South Bend Approach dropped me 3 miles from Niles. Same deal on the flight back - I even got Chicago approach to talk to me!
As previously posted, Kate and I made the roundtrip to see Grandma in South Bend this weekend. It was fine trip, great weather, good company, and a chance to say hey to Mom.
As usual, I checked the track Saturday night when we got home. All looked good except:
Apparently the RV-9A hyper-jump flux capacitor was working just fine. Notice the speed you Rocket-drivers..... Clearly something was amiss here. I checked the hit out in Cali and saw the url that was posted. Someone was trying to get my attention - and they did.
Clicking on the URL I could see I had become "almost famous" in a not so good way. Here are some excerpts:
"Emergency beacon called wide 1-1 today and its a plane, or using the plane symbol, thought I would let some know here as not sure if this is real or not. they are using the call also of n789ph i think.
any and all means for a emergency. any ideas?"
"There's a call in the comment field periodically - KD0CVN. Same guy as
the aircraft registration. Anyone called him yet?"
"Did some googling around, plane and unit might belong to:
*KD0CVN*
Peter D Howell
*
That beacon was over a residential area - if he was in trouble and went
down, we'll know soon enough."
"Has anybody called his residence ?"
"Called the airport - no answer.
Called FSS - no flight plan."
"Actually spoke to some folks from CAP. Gave them what I believed was the tailnumber at the time (now confirmed) along with last known coordinates from the beacon.
Guy I spoke to is a ham and knew what APRS is - he sent it up the chain."
"Last position (about 30 min ago) shows the plane in front of the hangar at the Anoka County airport. Presumably he'll be home soon. Google says it's about a 20 minute commute."
From here, cooler heads prevailed as they realized that I had landed in Niles and had headed back to Minne with Mom's oatmeal raisin cookies in tow. The techies started digging in and realized that there was a misconfigured digi on the ground in Belvidere, IL that took one of my packets and several from another tracker and showed them as emergency packets. Bob B, the inventor of APRS himself, even weighed in with the final explanation.
They might have gone a bit overboard with the calls, and I'm sure glad they did not call the house and tell Andi that Kate and I had gone down....but it was very nice to know they were watching and were ready to step in to take action. I corresponded with several of the guys, including Bob B and everything is cool. They are going to contact the digi operator and get his radio configured properly.
I think this accidental example continues to show the value of APRS in our planes. So if you need an antenna.........just kidding
P.S.
As for the no flight plan comment - I was in contact with ATC from 2 minutes after start up on the ground at Anoka, until South Bend Approach dropped me 3 miles from Niles. Same deal on the flight back - I even got Chicago approach to talk to me!
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