Packet radio: Direwolf and pilinbpq

I’ve been playing around recently with setting up some packet radio software on the Raspberry Pi. The next thing I was interested in getting working was a BPQ32 node with BBS and Chat. G8BPQ’s instructions here are pretty easy to follow. What I got stuck on however was whether BPQ needed or used ax25, and apparently it doesn’t. So from the simplest direwolf and linbpq setup, you start direwolf, configure linbpq to point to Direwolf’s virtual kiss tnc serial port, and off you go.

I played around testing with 2 radios, one with Direwolf, linbpq and a Rigblaster connected to a Yaesu FT-60 HT, and the second, an Icom 880 connected with a Rigblaster Plug and Play to a desktop running Linux Mint, also using Direwolf. There was some random oddness wth connecting from one to the other, maybe because of the radios in close proximity, that turned out I just needed to increase default timeout settings. I set these both to the same in direwolf.conf and bpq32.cfg:

TXDELAY=300

TXTAIL=30

Once I’d added these (based on other suggested settings elsewhere in other people’s BPQ configs), then I was off and running. Looks good!

Linbpq: configure via web page before bbs and chat apps start

It’s not immediately obvious from the docs, but after installing and creating a bpq32.cfg file for pilinbpq BPQ32 on the Pi (or Linux in general probably), after you’ve started pilinbpq running, you need to hit the admin web pages to configure the last few params before the services are accessible.

For example, if you telnet into your node locally and then type bbs or chat, you’ll see the error: “bbs application is not running”.

Hit the admin web pages for both bbs and chat, and complete the blank fields in the config. For me these where the applicationID and Streams values. The Id matches the id value of the app in the bpq32.cfg file. Streams is I think number of concurrent clients. Save values, restart, and you should be good.