Content area
Full text
You have to admire any company that is comfortable with calling itself "BigRedBee." Not BeeTrex. Not BeeCom. Just BigRedBee.
This is a small business with a small, clever product: the BeeLine GPS Tracker. The BeeLine is a tiny ( 1 ¼ × 3 inch) module that contains a GPS receiver and GPS patch antenna, a Lithium-Poly battery and a 70-cm FM transmitter. The whole package weighs about 2 ounces.
The BeeLine is designed to be a go-anywhere APRS tracker. In case you're unfamiliar with the term, APRS stands for the Automatic Position Reporting System. An APRS tracker takes position information supplied by a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, reformats it as packet radio data, converts the data to a modulated audio signal and passes the signal to a transmitter (typically a VHF FM radio). At the receiving end, a packet radio Terminal Node Controller (TNC) decodes the transmission and feeds the information to a computer running APRS software. The result is a...