N3UJJ's APRS Project

Part 2
aka
We need more power Scotty.

This is part 2 of my APRS Project, and at this point I'm going to make APRS work if it kills me.
I felt I needed more power, and I happened to have an old 2 meter amplifier laying around somewhere.
The 10 year old Radio Shack amplifier powered up and worked, 5 watts in and 30 watts out, but would it solve the problem?

The first test run was a SUCCESS !!! I could hit every Digipeater from my home to work. I took the APRS rig boating, and tracked my boat trip. This was really cool, I could go to findU.com and see breadcrumbs of my travels, all kind of neat tracking stuff that you would have to normally have to pay $45 to $60 a month to have. Now all I needed to do was package this wiring mess up (the picture doesn't show the wiring for the amplifier).
I couldn't wait to test it on a trip to Charlotte NC. (summer of 2005).
Story continues after the picture.

My trip to North Carolina was a great test of my setup, there were areas where I was 15 to 20 miles away from the nearest digipeater, and the 30 watts wasn't making it, it looked like I still needed "more power" to hit all the repeaters (sigh), but I did have a 50 watt 2 meter mobile unit that I wasn't using.

So here is a re-cap of the project so far:
30 watts really made a difference (over 5 watts), I could hit most digipeaters in my travels, but I wanted to be able to hit digipeaters 90% of the time.
I needed to find a way to "package" everything (all the wiring was a mess).

Read APRS Project Part 3