It was 40 degrees first thing the in the morning and 57 degrees for the high. A light drizzle moved in just after the parade started and continued for most of the parade. The rain was never heavy at our location at parking services.
The RV was setup next to the ARES trailer at parking Services. This served as my operating position for the event. The RV was ran entirely on battery power. Running the lights and Icom 705 consumed 16% (32Ah) of the battery. Some solar was gained during the day but was very limited due to the cloudy skies.
I set up a coffee station using the Oupes power station and B2 expansion pack. This gave us a total of ~3000Wh which was plenty to get us through the day. The Keurig only used about 25% of the overall available power of the battery.
Registration used Mike's, KG4VDK, new computer entry application to capture the entrant data as they arrived. This app built a CSV spreadsheet which was transmitted over BPSK500 from registration to me at parking services. This system worked perfectly and we had no issues getting a signal between registration and parking services.
The digipeater was deployed but FAILED to work. The coax failed on the inside of the box to the radio. Need a better checklist! Two 3Ah batteries were used to power the radio. Need to redesign this box to run on the HT battery most of the time BUT add a power pole input where an additional battery could be used when longer run time is needed.
While my digipeater didn't function, there was another guy that was running one of the Vero VGC radios. This radio connects to the cell phone and will work as a digipeater. His setup helped to gate many posits to the internet during the day but we should not depend on it since it was moving around and at a low elevation the entire day. This can create confusion. Also, my station at parking services was heard directly by the K4HCK digipeater.
I did try to setup YAAC as a digipeater but was unsuccessful. Need to figure out why the YAAC digipeater wouldn't work. Was it not digipeating or not being heard?
Note: Trackers will more than likely be deployed in cars. Need a way to secure the radios upright if at all possible so that the antennas on the radios are in the vertical position.
I deployed two APRS trackers. The first was an old Yaesu FT2D which was placed in the grand marshal's car. This tracker worked until about 4 blocks before the square. This limit could have been the result of the digipeater not being operational.
The second tracker was a home-brew unit and attached to the Santa float. While the unit came online without issue, it failed before the parade even started. Initially I assumed that the battery had died but this was proven wrong when Mike picked up the unit at the end of the parade and confirmed that the radio still had battery. Upon inspection after the fact, the unit came online after a reboot. At this time it is unknown why the unit failed. I think using an actual radio would be better suited for this application.