It’s been a few years since I last played with Packet Radio on a Raspberry Pi, but I have been playing with the uz7ho soundcard software recently and have some packet APRS via the International Space Station.
Looking back at the Direwolf and ax25 setup I was playing with before, I couldn’t actually remember what the order of commands was to get things started up, despite still having it all still configured and installed on the same Pi that I used before. Assuming ax25 and Direwolf are installed and configured (see here and here), the steps to get ax25 up and running and connected are:
- Start direwolf with: “direwolf -t 0 -p”
- Note the /dev/pts/x value it returns on startup
- Run: “sudo kissattach /dev/pts/1 1” (where /dev/pts/1 matches the same value from direwolf startup)
- The second 1 is the network name from your axports file, like:
1 KK6DCT-5 19200 255 2 2m packet
Ensure direwolf.conf has the same callsign-ssid value, in my example here, KK6DCT-5
Ensure alsamixer has volume around 3/4 for your audio card
To find what audio card device you’re using, use: “axplay -l”. With a Signalink, this shows up as:
$ aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA] Subdevices: 8/8 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Subdevice #1: subdevice #1 Subdevice #2: subdevice #2 Subdevice #3: subdevice #3 Subdevice #4: subdevice #4 Subdevice #5: subdevice #5 Subdevice #6: subdevice #6 Subdevice #7: subdevice #7 card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 1: CODEC [USB Audio CODEC], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio] Subdevices: 0/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
The Signalink is card 1, subdevice 0, so the corresponding config in direwolf.conf for this device is:
ADEVICE plughw:1,0
To summarize:
- Start direwolf, grab the /dev/pts/x value
- Start kissattach with the same /dev/pts/x value
- Now you should be able to “call 1 nodename” and get a packet connection out via Direwolf to your radio.
