APRS craziness!

I've heard a lot about APRS but I'm yet to get into it. In recent months, the APRS community in Kuala Lumpur seems to be active and generates interest among local ham community. The first ever APRS digipeater is going to be up and running real soon now. And surely, your truly does not want to be left out. I've Garmin eTrex which I bought quite a long time ago (in July 2000 actually when I was in Houston TX) which I don't really use it. Been using it previously for navigation, using a software running on my Palm Vx (which I still have it somewhere in one of my many boxes of old stuff) and used it for geocaching activities when I was in UK (2002-2006). Now, it seems that I could put a good use to it .. by streaming my GPS position to strangers :D

Anyway, to make long story short, I was about to brew my own tracker board but I'm not easily satisfy with thing that is limited to sending out packet. I was looking high and low for a device which could encode and decode the APRS packet and display it on LCD display. While searching for it, I came across a tracker which has the features as what I wanted and more .. Argent Data's Tracker2 seems to be the perfect answer. And to my joy .. it seems that I could have it displayed not only on LCD .. but with certain Garmin Nuvi GPS (300, 700 and few other FMI series), I could actually display the other APRS stations on the Nuvi display as waypoint. And to add to my excitement, Nuvi 350 could actually send and receive APRS messages too.

So .. with all these information .. and after consulting the guru, I have put an order today for Tracker2 with Nuvi cable. I'm expecting it to be on my hand in a week or two.. a new toy to play with but I still need to find a Nuvi 350 which seems to have been discontinued .. someone is coming back from UK and I saw Amazon UK has it for £90 inclusive shipping .. will surely ordered it there and ask my friend to bring it back home.

I'm excited!!! Couldn't wait really .. yeah.. as always, to show off new toys.