Hi, My name is toyo (JG2RZF). As you know, pacific side of some of North-East region (JA7) of Japan is still power outage And we cannot see the APRS mobile in this area because of no IGATE activity. For example, we cannot see the trace of Wakayama Red Cross (JA3FRI-12) now.
Can we use satellite digi for this purpose?
We have advised Toyo san that ARISS APRS digipeater can be used over Japan for this purpose. Any APRS operators in the affected area can switch to ISS digipeater by simply changing frequency to 145.825. ISS is coming over Japan about 6 times a day in the afternoon.
The terrestrial path VIA WIDE?-? should work fine. But is better to change path to VIA ARISS so that the packets will be marked as having been digipeated by RS0ISS-4 each time.
We hope Astronauts can be sure to keep APRS digipeater operating over Japan on 145.825.
We hope that stations NOT in the disaster area can monitor the ISS downlink for emergency traffic and can IGATE the downlink into the APRS Internet System.
Bob, WB4APR