So you wanna run a mobile station. You've got a few options to choose from these days and it'spretty hard to go wrong. This document won't cover what options you've got, but rather how to configure them.

Something to bear in mind is that APRS traffic takes place on 144.390MHz. For those people storm spotting or using 2m FM voice for emergency operations, your APRS setup may desense or affect the peformance of your 2m rig during nets. As such, you may wish to coordinate with your storm spotting groups to decide the best course of action in trying to use APRS with 2m FM voice.

The goal of Nashvilleaprs.net with regards to mobile arrangements is to provide coverage for mobile rigs running 5 watts. While it is possible to run higher power mobile setups, we feel that 5 watts is the magic number in order to be able to support 2m FM voice and other activities while mobile. Your mileage may vary.

Suggestions for running a Tinytrak
The TinyTrak and Opentracker have become a popular option for those wishing to run a low cost "homebrew / homebuilt" APRS setup. These tracker have many useful features and take the place of the TNC. The Nashvilleaprs.net suggested configuration of the TinyTrak is to beacon no more than every 3 minutes. This is especially important if the "Smart Beaconing" feature is turned on. If the Smart Beacon feature is turned on, our suggestion is to beacon every 3 minutes if your course stays relatively straight and to beacon if your direction changes by 90 or more degrees. If you think about it, if you're traveling down the interstate, it's pretty safe to assume that you're going to still be on that interstate 3 minutes later. And if your course changes direction then you're going to beacon anyway (hopefully not by 90 degrees on the interstate).

Options to consider for your UNPROTO path Please note the following configuration is no longer suggested and not be supported on the Middle Tennessee area digis:

RELAY,WIDE,TRACE

It was announced at the Hamvention 2003 APRS forum that TRACE is deprecated. In 2005 the APRS SIG mail list hammered out the New n-N Paradigm.

This new basically boils down to this:

RELAY is replaced by WIDE1-1 so that even older firmware TNCs can work in the new 
paradigm and not cause too much congestion.

WIDE is replaced by WIDEn-N The n=N in your settings butN counts down in the packet 
as it is digipeated. Keep N as small as possible.

TRACE is replaced by (TNn-N for Tennessee, KYn-N for Kentucky, ALn-N for Alabamea, etc.) 
This is used to keep packets from digipeating outside your home state.

Here are some UNPROTO configurations:

WIDE2-2
WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1
WIDE1-1,WIDE2-2