Alcan Road Trip Master Post

 

Girdwood, Alaska to Cypress, Texas via the Alcan.  Departed 15 Sept 26.  Arrived 25 Sept 26. Two countries, three Canadian territories, and seven US states.

This post will serve as a place to bring together thoughts on my road trip that do not fit cleanly into the daily posts or general thoughts.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Lessons learned:

Google maps was helpful, but do not rely totally on it, and know which way you're supposed to be going before you set off.

On the topic of mapping, an automotive head unit that is capable of navigation would have been incredibly useful.  Definitely an upgrade to consider for this current truck.

This truck can only display metric or imperial units, not both.  I'd print out a cheat sheet of kilometers to miles and tape it to the steering wheel instead of trying to make sense of everything in metric.

Bring a fire extinguisher.

Bring a gas can.  Even a small 5gal can is sufficient.

A dash cam and/or 360 camera mounted to the roof of the vehicle.  There were so many scenic areas with nowhere to pull over for a picture opportunity.

Starlink was an absolute game changer.  There were multiple areas of extended cell phone gaps, with not another soul for miles, and it was reassuring to be able to text or call family whenever I wanted.

Let someone know where you are and where you plan to make it by the end of the day.  Status checks ideally daily, at least every few days.

Know where your finishing point for each day will be before setting out for the day.  Include alternates and stretch goals.

Focus more on camping as opposed to hotels/motels each night.  This would open up more options of where to stop each evening.  A small teardrop trailer would have been a good fit, given I was travelling solo.

A small camp fridge would have been a better option than a cooler.

A battery bank plus inverter or combo unit would have made a fridge possible and Starlink much more flexible.  It was not an outrageous inconvenience, but it would have been nice to be able to power Starlink through short stops when the truck was turned off, such as at gas stations.

From a Ham Radio perspective:

APRS coverage was intermittent until approximately Fort Nelson, although my jank install of the mobile radio did not help matters at all.  There was constant interference from the truck right on 144.39MHz.  If I were to attempt this trip again I'd take the time to install an HF radio and run HF APRS, as documented by WA8LMF.  The following screenshots, courtesy of aprs.fi, show how relatively poor the performance was.

Coverage in Anchorage/MatSu

Whitehorse

Fort Nelson

Dawson Creek and Grande Prairie

Edmonton and Calgary

Into Montana

Colorado and my unintended detour into Kansas

Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle

Doing my best to skirt around the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area

Alcan Road Trip Day 1 - Girdwood to Tok

Day 1.  15 Sept 26.  Girdwood to Tok via Glennallen.  358.8 miles

APRS track for day 1.  My subpar radio installation and its effect on my APRS coverage will be a continual theme throughout this trip.

The Matanuska River valley.  It was clearly moose hunting season.

HAARP.  Would like to make it to an open house one of these days.

 

Moving and Environmental Sensors

Moving preparations continue, with the current target of hitting the road NLT 15 September.  As part of this, the weather station has been taken offline and packed up.  As a result, weather.kl1v.net is no longer going to be updated.  I am keeping the page up for now, until I have an opportunity to download and archive the database.  There's a few interesting events in there I want to preserve, such as the barometric pressure spike from the Tongan volcanic eruption.

Farewell Alaska, but hopefully not forever. I go to reluctantly become a Texan.

Experimenting with KV4P Hardware

I recently obtained KV4P hardware, and on a whim decided to plug it into the Android based head unit I installed in my truck. While the KV4P app does work, it doesn't play very well with this particular head unit, and doesn't pick up the gps.  On the other hand, aprsdroid works extremely well, and the NA7Q edition has support for offline maps.  Definitely a 'warrents further investigation' arrangement.

Ham Projects for 2026 - With Some Bonuses

It is beginning to look like spring in Alaska once again, and the itch to do projects has resurfaced.  In no particular order... 

 

Site Summit BBS

A LinBPQ based packet BBS is still on the menu for Site Summit.  Minimum capabilities will include VHF 145.010 at 1200 baud, UHF 440.050 at 9600 baud, BBS functionality, chat, and winlink support on both frequencies.  I would also like to extend VARA support, at least on the UHF port to support winlink operation.

Optical Comms Project

Utilize two bi-di SFP modules with appropriate lenses for free space optical communications at distance.  It is my hope that I can achieve a stable connection over at least one mile.  Doubt it will turn into anything, but it tickles my scientific curiosity.

VARA HF APRS IGate

Deploy a VARA HF APRS igate to replace the failed robust packet igate on 30m.  Figure out a more permanent antenna solution for the igate so it is not desensed by QRO at the RSOC.

Hermes Lite 2 - Hard Rock 50 amp interface

Current direction I am leaning is to interface an ESP32 or similar to the Hard Rock 50 serial port to enable a web interface for the amp.  This will allow whatever software is driving the radio to send band data and read SWR over the network.

WiFi HaLow mesh experimentation

802.11ah utilizing babel routing to support a low cost and easy to deploy part 15 compliant MANET.  Think along the lines of Data Slayer, just with less clickbait titles. 

Truck radio installation

I have an ambitious list of radios I want to install in my truck.  First among them is a VHF/UHF rig of some sort.  Currently I am leaning towards a V-7600 paired with a head unit running android, to allow APRS function neatly integrated into the vehicle.  I also plan to install my IC-706, connected to a tuner and 102" CB whip, and a mini pc running Ion2G for basic ALE capabilities and to be able to do winlink on the go and some drive up POTA.  Having the android head unit would also support some other fun radio modes, such as pocket25 for scanning digital LMR on the go, or hardwiring a meshtastic node into the truck.

DIY Drone

 Build an endurance tricopter as a platform for cameras, utilizing 802.11ah for the primary control channel.  Use a steamdeck or similar as its ground station.

 HF antennas

 Take down at least one of the end-fed longwire antennas and replace it with the terminated folded dipole.  Possibly also a single band dipole or OFCD along the eaves of the garage.

Commercial Digital Trunked Radio Scanning

Recently, a small program called DSD+ released a free version of the software allowing following of digital trunked radio systems with only one sdr dongle.  Previous versions of this program required two dongles in order to effectively follow the trunk transmission and voice transmissions simultaneously.  I've been playing with it at home, monitoring the ski resort, power company, and most interesting to me, the public safety radio network.

Alaska Land Mobile Radio (ALMR) is a P25 Phase II/TDMA VHF radio network covering most of Southcentral Alaska, up to Fairbanks, and down the panhandle to Juneau.  The municipality of Anchorage has a complimentary system, referred to as Anchorage Wide Area Radio Network (AWARN) on 700MHz covering the Anchorage borough and networked with ALMR to transparently pass traffic.  It never fails to surprise me how much information leaks out of the system.  As shown in the picture above, each site advertises who it is, who their neighbors are and what frequencies their control channels are, and shown in the picture below, the health of the network.

Even if a voice channel is encrypted, the network will still tell you what radios are in the area based on who is subscribed to that particular repeater, and who is talking to who, since by necessity each radio has a unique ID number.  While I don't have a transmit capable sdr to verify this, I have read of attacks where individual radios respond to spoofed network pings without notifying the user.  Such an attack would make DFing of a targeted radio trivial with a transmitter and a Kraken, although the attacker would have to have done their homework beforehand and be transmitting themselves, opening them up to potential counter-attack.

Another potential attack vector would be what amounts to a wifi deauth attack, where a jamming station monitors a site or multiple sites for subscription requests and immediately sends a corresponding unsubscribe request, effectively conducting targeted jamming of a repeater at a lower power level than dumb blanket jamming.

All of this would constitute comparatively sophisticated attack vectors.  To date, I am unaware of any such attacks occurring in the wild.

Cross Reference of Radio Services Avalable to the Individual

 The CERT group in my hometown has become interested in radios for its members.  It always comes back to the question of "who do you want to talk to and how far do you want to talk?"  Therefore, I generated a basic chart of radio services available to the average person (that is, not business band or anything esoteric).  I tried to cite CFR where available, but keep in mind when reading this, it is a generalization.

 

 

	Citizens Band (95.901)	FRS (95.501)	MURS (95.2701)	GMRS (95.1701)	Amateur Technician Class (Part 97)
Frequency Range	Low VHF 27MHz	UHF 460MHz	VHF 150MHz	UHF 460MHz	Low VHF and up 29MHz+
Channels	40	22	5	30 Note: shared with FRS except for repeater channels	Unlimited (Subject to local band plan agreements)
License Required	No.  License by FCC rule	No. License by FCC rule.  Secondary user, so subject to interference from primary licensees.	No. License by FCC rule. Secondary user, so subject to interference from primary licensees.	Yes. $35 license for 10 year term. No test required. License covers licensee + 'family' (95.1705)	Yes. $35 non-refundable fee and 35 question test for 10 year term. License covers individual only.
Maximum Power / Expected Range	4 watts (AM) 12 watts (SSB) Realistic range in rural environment 10-20 mi?	2 watts. Range arbitrarily limited by fixed antenna requirement. Realistic range in rural environment 3-5 mi?	2 watts. Range may be extended by improved external antenna, but no repeaters permitted. Realistic range in rural environment 5-7 mi?	50 watts. Range may be extended by external antenna and repeaters. Simplex range in rural environment 15-25 mi?	1500 watts. Sub bands may have lower limits. 50+mi range simplex in ideal conditions. Repeaters and linking can arbitrarily extend range.
Data	No (95.971)	Yes (95.531(a))	Yes (95.2731 (a) and (b))	Yes (95.1731 (d))	All analog and digital emission types permitted*
Type Accepted Equipment Availability	Inexpensive vehicle mount systems commonly available. Handheld units uncommon with relatively poor performance due to antenna size.	Inexpensive handheld units commonly available. Units capable of data transfer uncommon.	Inexpensive handheld units commonly available. Units capable of data transfer uncommon.	Inexpensive handheld units commonly available. Vehicle mount systems available. Repeater systems commercially available.	FCC type acceptance not required.