Tag: amateur radio

Posted on

Amateur Radio homebrew: Raspberry Pi + Packet Radio + social networking integration

I’m putting something together for our River City Amateur Radio Comms Society homebrew show n tell later this year. Here’s my ingredients so far:

I’m thinking of building a bridge between Amateur Radio Packet and social networking, like Twitter.

So far I’ve roughed out node.js to Twitter integration using node-oauth, and I I’ve put together a simple prototype using the node-ax25 library to connect to the KISS virtual TNC on Direwolf. It receives packets and writes callsigns and messages to the console.

Right now I’m testing this on a PC running Debian, with a Rigblaster Plug n Play connected to an Icom 880h. Later when my TNC-Pi arrives I’ll migrate this to the Pi.

So far using the node-ax25 library looks pretty easy. Here’s some code so far to dump received callsigns to the console:

var ax25 = require("ax25");

var tnc = new ax25.kissTNC(
    {   serialPort : "/dev/pts/1",
        baudRate : 9600
    }
);

tnc.on("frame",
    function(frame) {
        //console.log("Received AX.25 frame: " + frame);
        var packet = new ax25.Packet({ 'frame' : frame });
        console.log(new Date() + "From "
            + formatCallsign(packet.sourceCallsign, packet.sourceSSID)
            + " to "
            + formatCallsign(packet.destinationCallsign, packet.destinationSSID));

        if(packet.infoString !=""){
            console.log(">  " + packet.infoString);
        }
    }
);

/**
 * Formats a callsign optionally including the ssid if present
 */
function formatCallsign(callsign, ssid){
    var formattedCallsign = "";
    if(ssid == "" || ssid == "0"){
         formattedCallsign = callsign;
    }
    else{
        formattedCallsign = callsign + "-" + ssid;
    }

   return formattedCallsign;
}

The output for  received messages so far looks like this:

Wed Apr 19 2017 23:10:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)From KBERR  to KJ6NKR

Wed Apr 19 2017 23:12:05 GMT-0700 (PDT)From AE6OR  to BEACON

>  Š¤¤@à–¤ˆŽ@@`–„Š¤¤@`®žžˆ²@`–„Š¨@`¨‚žŠ@aðHello from 5W Garage packet node AUBURN 73's Steli !

Wed Apr 19 2017 23:12:08 GMT-0700 (PDT)From AE6OR  to BEACON

>  Š¤¤@à–¤ˆŽ@@à–„Š¤¤@ஞžˆ²@`–„Š¨@`¨‚žŠ@aðHello from 5W Garage packet node AUBURN 73's Steli !

Wed Apr 19 2017 23:16:49 GMT-0700 (PDT)From K6JAC -6 to ID    

>  K6JAC-6/R BBOX/B KBERR/N

Wed Apr 19 2017 23:19:31 GMT-0700 (PDT)From K6WLS -4 to ID    

>  Network Node (KWDLD)

Wed Apr 19 2017 23:19:50 GMT-0700 (PDT)From NM3S   to BEACON

>  Mike in South Sac.  Please feel free to leave a message. 73's
Posted on

Packet Radio: Checking in to the Central California Sunday Packet Net using Linpac and Direwolf

I didn’t think it was year ago that I last checked to the Central California Packet Sunday night net, but looking for notes on how to send packet unproto frames from Linpac, this post was today exactly last year. Apparently January 15th is my favorite day for doing some packet radio.

This is using ax25, Direwolf and Linpac setup on Debian that I posted about a few days back. I did a screen recording of the net checkins so you can see what a packet net looks like. It’s not exactly fast paced, and in the middle there’s some WinLink email inbox checking going on, but you can see Ben KG6BNL running Net Control, and then check-ins that follow.

In the screencapture I’m ssh’d from my Mac into my desktop upstairs which has a Rigblaster Plug n Play connected to my Icom 880h. The top session is Direwolf, so you can see it’s decoding all the packets it hears. The bottom session is Linpac, where I’m using :unproto to send my check-in.

Posted on

Packet Radio with Debian Hamradio Pure Blend

I stumbled across this concept of ‘Debian Pure Blends‘ a couple of days back. These are Debian distros that are configured with software preinstalled for a specific purpose, like graphic design, and astronomy. The Ham Radio distro caught my eye as it’s preconfigured with ax25 and Direwolf for Packet Radio.

The trouble is, while it has these included in the distro so you get them out of the box, it doesn’t seem they’re configured, and worse, the ax25 support doesn’t appear to work with Direwolf.

Here’s a few notes of my experimenting:

Direwolf uses a direwolf.conf file in your home directory which you customize with your callsign and setup to connect with your soundcard input and output. There doesn’t seem to be a copy of this file anywhere on the filesystem. The file is usually created if you’re building/installing from source by running ‘make install-conf’. I searched my fresh Debian install and couldn’t find a copy of direwolf.conf anywhere, so already being familiar with Direwolf, I decided to uninstall the pre-installed version (apt-get remove direwolf) and build/install from source unstead. See my previous notes on how to do this.

Immediately ran into the libasound library missing:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lasound
 collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
 Makefile.linux:257: recipe for target 'fsk_fast_filter.h' failed
 make: *** [fsk_fast_filter.h] Error 1

This is fixed by installing libasound:

apt-get install libasound2-dev

 

Edit /etc/ax25/axports and add a line like this:
1 YOURCALL-1 1200 255 2 2m packet

Starting up direwolf for the first time:

 kev@kh-debian:/etc/ax25$ direwolf -t 0 -p
 Dire Wolf version 1.3

Reading config file /home/kev/direwolf.conf
 Audio device for both receive and transmit: default (channel 0)
 Channel 0: 1200 baud, AFSK 1200 & 2200 Hz, E+, 44100 sample rate.
 ERROR can't open device /dev/ttyUSB0 for channel 0 PTT control.
 Permission denied
 Note: PTT not configured for channel 0. (Ignore this if using VOX.)
 Ready to accept KISS client application on port 8001 ...
 Ready to accept AGW client application 0 on port 8000 ...
 Virtual KISS TNC is available on /dev/pts/1
 WARNING - Dire Wolf will hang eventually if nothing is reading from it.
 Created symlink /tmp/kisstnc -> /dev/pts/1

Looks like /dev/ttyUSB0 cannot be opened for my PTT on my Rigblaster Plug n Play.

Following instructions from here, as root, I did:

usermod -a -G dialout kev

and then logged out and logged back in again. That fixed that issue.

The input volume was low, so I bumped up the mic slider in the top right to about half way, and now the input volume is better:

KG6SJT-10 audio level = 43(20/19) [NONE] |||||||__
 [0.3] KG6SJT-10>ID:Network Node (YCARES)
 Unknown message type N, motorcycle

 

Next up, starting Direwolf and then starting up my ax25 stack with kissattach and mkiss (which I’ve covered before here), I was getting a Permission Denied error:

kev@kh-debian:~$ sudo kissattach /dev/ptmx 1 44.56.4.118
AX.25 port 1 bound to device ax0
Awaiting client connects on
/dev/pts/4

Followed by:

kev@kh-debian:~$ sudo mkiss /tmp/kisstnc /dev/pts/4
 mkiss: open: Permission denied

I posted a question about this on the Direwolf group on Yahoo Groups here. Since it looks like mkiss is getting permission denied accessing /tmp/kisstnc from Direwolf, I started Direwolf with a sudo and this avoided this error. Direwolf shouldn’t need to run with sudo permissions so something’s not quite right, but this did allow me to get up and running, and then I could ‘axcall 1 kberr’ to make a connection to nearest packet node.

To get to this point I could have installed a vanilla version of Debian, Direwolf from source, and ax25, and I probably would have got to the same point in about the same about of time, but when I have time I’ll take a look at the other apps that get preinstalled.

Proudly powered by WordPress