While most of us carry cell phones that have GPS and other location services, they require a significant amount of infrastructure to be useful. Drive from Washington to Alaska like [Lonney] did a while back, where that infrastructure is essentially nonexistent, and you’ll need to come up with some other solutions to let friends and family know where you are.
A tool called the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) is fairly robust in the very high frequency (VHF) part of the amateur radio spectrum, but this solution still relies on a not-insignificant amount of infrastructure for the limited distances involved with VHF. [Lonney] adapted a few other tools to get APRS up and running in the HF range, letting his friends keep tabs on him even from the most remote locations.
The build relies on a second piece of software called JS8Call which is a text-based mode that allows radio operators to communicate “keyboard to keyboard”. It has a number of interesting features beyond this basic functionality though, including message forwarding. The software in [Lonney]’s build allows a small computer equipped with a GPS receiver to gather its location information, compose a brief message in JS8Call, and then send it to the APRS network in the high frequency (HF) portion of the spectrum which supports much further communications distances than VHF generally allows.
The build goes a little beyond the functionality of widely-available radio software, though. He’s also written scripts that automate a lot of the tricky parts of dealing with a car and automatic position reporting radio
