APRS (ham radio tracker) suitability?

[Jay911]

Hi folks,
Relatively new P2V+ operator here - my fire department owns the machine and I use it to shoot our training and some of our incidents (including one time doing some aerial photography on behalf of the police, for a crash investigation).
I'm also an amateur radio operator and a regular user of the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) service used by many a ham.
I tried searching the forum for APRS and other similar keywords but it seems there is fuzzy logic in the forum search function because I kept getting "apres" and "approaches" hits instead of what I was exactly searching for - and no hits on APRS itself, so I presume it hasn't been discussed here before.

So, has anybody tried fitting their craft with an APRS tracker? Is there one small enough to not harm the flight characteristics/increase the craft's weight to the point of causing issues flying?

 

[robsquad]

welcome to the forum jay . what exactly do you want to do with the tracker ?

 

[Fplvert]

Welcome, Jay, I believe Captin Bob was using something similar to what you're asking about.

Anyone using a Tracker? Recommendations? | DJI Phantom Forum

 

[Jay911]

Thanks, that's a neat read!

robsquad - APRS is typically, for me, just a neat 'vehicle location' system. (The creator of APRS is a little uptight that people use it solely for that, but to each their own.) The fun part is that other people than just me can see where the device is. If you look at the last link in my signature (VE6SRT) it shows my ham radio (handheld) location on a publicly available map. An APRS tracker tied to a drone would have the same "global visibility", provided its beacons were picked up by an APRS gateway to the Internet.