2025 Army-Navy Ball Track
POSTED ON: Monday, December 15, 2025 5:00 PM by Christine Maceo
At noon on Friday, December 12, midshipmen from the 13th company began the annual Army-Navy Ball Run from Tecumseh Court. Although Annapolis and Baltimore are 29.5 miles apart, the winding route selected by the Midshipman traversed 36.5 miles.
W3ADO, the USNA Amateur Radio Club founded in 1928, provided tracking and communications with the runners using the automatic packet reporting system APRS, a real-time digital communication system that operates at 144.390MHz and uses digipeaters and internet-gates to reach the APRS Internet system. The website www.aprs.fi displayed the call sign (W3ADO-9), position data, a USNA Ball Track message, and packet history that showed the track log.
MIDN 2/C Micah Wilson made the APRS radio used in this year’s Ball Track using the Byonics MTTB4-Mini, with has 1.5 watts of output power. Micah tested its communication with the USNA APRS Digipeater (hosted by the Space Systems Engineering Lab) prior to deployment.
This year marks 40 years since the first USNA Ball Track using APRS.
APRS was developed by Commander Bob Bruninga (WB4APR-SK) at USNA in 1982.
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Category: Academics, General Interest