Baofeng to iPhone Cord or Connector

Does anyone know of a stock cord or connector that will go from a hand-talki to an iPhone for aprs decoding. I am having trouble finding something that does not trip the PTT. I see several solutions on the web about making your own but I would prefer to purchase one if possible.

Thanks

Brad

Make sure you use the earphone jack on the radio not the mike jack.

Bob

Sometimes I do stupid stuff but not that much. I have a double pin kenwood style connector so it's hard to screw that part up. Apple uses a different pin out with the ground on the bottom sleeve of the 4 conductor pin. This seems to screw everything up. Have a feeling I will be getting the soldering iron out.

Brad

So the answer is no. There is no off the shelf solution. But there is a cheap solution if you are handy with a soldering iron. For about 11 dollars in parts you can put together a cord and have iPhone APRS. Not confirmed with BRB. I still have to tidy up the board to include, trimming wires, adding strain relief and shrink tube but this is close to final product. I will have to come up with a convienent way to hold both the radio and phone but that should not be a big deal. The board is 1.0 x .315 inches and the parts are 1/32 x 1/16. Not very easy to deal with but manageable.

did you try it without the cable? I get pretty good results just using the mic with aprsdroid but I don't know if you iphone app can use the mic.

Yes. I could get packet reception but the phone needed to be right on top of the speaker. Not sure why it is so sensitive? I figure out in the field will be noisy, even if it is just wind, and a corded solution eliminates all of that.

You have a good point about the wind. All of my tests have been indoors.

Nice work. I see you are another oshpark customer!

Yes, $1.70 for three boards and free shipping. How can you beat that? If / when I need another board I know where I'm going.


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A rocketeer I know demo'd how he held his phone right over the Baofeng and although it was a textbook kludge, it picked up the BRB output just fine.

After seeing that I put a Baofeng in my Amazon shopping cart.

If ya can pull that data off to the phone's aprs decoding app, is there a mapping program in the phone you could shunt it to? I'll tell ya, it's a lot easier if it is interfaced to a map automatically as opposed to having to input the coordinates correctly into a handheld mapping GPS or program.
Decimal degrees? Degrees, minutes, seconds? Degrees, decimal minutes? I've heard a lot of cussing on the range when an individual is using the "manual" method and the units don't jive. If one goes that route, sit at home ahead of time with the manuals of said devices and make sure you can take the units directly off of your decoding device and manually input the final lat/long in the correct units into your mapping GPS or app.

Also, when using direct audio off an earphone jack, you have to experiment and get the volume adjusted so the packets are decoded efficiently. Too high or too low a gain and you'll end up with a blank space. This is true with software decoding like direwolf (and others) You bump the volume knob and you could miss packets. The direct connection between the FT1DR, -8GR or D72A avoids this problem. Kurt

I don't know about the iphone app, but the android aprs app has a map feature built in that shows the locations of the transmitters.

App = https://koomasi.com/pocketpacket/

cwbullet said:

App = https://koomasi.com/pocketpacket/

Click to expand...

That looks good. Only issue I can see topically is one will need to have cell phone/internet reception in order to get the map information from the APRS-IS servers. I don't know if there is a map cache option. That could be a problem in a remote area with no cell phone reception. Not likely in this day and age for most folks. It also looks to me that one can use and decode their 70cm frequency APRS trackers and have the information displayed on the map in the phone? It is mentioned that an acoustic method could be tried if no cable available. If one has an Android phone and an APRS tracker, looks like another economical option. Almost makes me want to ditch my $10.00 phone. Kurt

I can't remember where but it has been suggested that you also download FeeGPS. This allows you to copy gps coordinates from PocketPacket into FreeGPS as a waypoint and then just use the goto feature when cell data is not available. If that were to fail I would just take a stand alone GPS unit or DF the beacon. In any event there should be several options available.


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