MB7UIV is back

A little history
In January 2000 I started running the first licensed APRS Internet gateway in the UK originally with the callsign GB7UIV.  Within a week of experiments starting on the 26th January 2000, the gateway was on air and connected to the internet 24/7 except for periods when the connection dropped out and the modem (remember those?) had to redial.  The callsign changed to MB7UIV some time later.

The gateway was on 144.800MHz and was on the air until the 5th June 2010 when it was finally retired. At the time of closedown it was still running UI-View32, written by the late Roger Barker (G4IDE) and a very modest computer, a 1.5GHz P4 system with just 1Gb RAM and Windows 2000.
The RF side was a Kenwood TM-261E with 10 Watts ERP from a roof mounted co-linear and driven by a PacComm Tiny-2 Mk2 in KISS mode.  The packet driver used to control the TNC was the AGW packet engine, know as AGWPE.
The callsign of GB7UIV and then MB7UIV was chosen to reflect the very popular APRS software in use at the time: UI-View.

The return of MB7UIV
At 13:55z on Wednesday 8th February 2017, MB7UIV returned as an APRS receive only iGate using a Raspberry Pi Zero and an RTL-SDR dongle configured as per the method described in this blog.  All local APRS traffic received here on 144.800MHz is gated to the APRS Tier2 Server Network.

I’m very pleased to have MB7UIV active again and am happy to provide the service to any radio amateurs in the area who operate APRS in any way whatsoever.

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