What is the RF Power output of the Pocket Tracker?
Unless you’ve got some special frame of reference, asking the power output rating of a Pocket Tracker is not a fair question. Please allow me to explain. I’ll bet every packet or APRS station you’ve ever seen was using a transmitter that was originally designed to transmit a voice-grade signal, then loosely adapted for packet / APRS use. Voice signals have an audio frequency range from about 300 Hz to 5 kHz. Packet uses two frequencies: 1200 Hz and 2200 Hz. The transmitter in the Pocket Tracker was designed from the ground-plane up to be an APRS transmitter. The Pocket Tracker transmitter has a specially designed pre-emphasis stage that boosts the signal and reduces the noise. We also have a special way of setting the deviation to spread the modulation energy across the entire bandwidth of a standard FM channel, even though packet data only uses two tones that are just a kHz apart. Pocket Trackers sing real modem tones. You can clearly hear the difference. Everything else sounds ragged
