APRS digipeater/iGate on Raspberry Pi

[Noel Petit]

Here is my outline of my effort to create WB0VGI-7 as an iGate and digipeater here in Minnesota. We have a large hole in APRS coverage between the Twin Cities and Duluth which I am trying to fill. I started with a Tiny Trak4 and that worked fine, but decided to bite the bullet and build one out of a Pi and USB audio interface. Here is the link to my google doc.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qnvGFhRquTI7oSLp4vSDtpCBoL3hCYa-_Y5guT6vE0o/edit?usp=sharing

Would love to have your comments and improvements. You can see this thing running on aprs.fi. I am using a Yaesu FT-897D and a 4 element beam pointed north to cover most of this big gap. I don't hear many stations to the north except when mobiles come down Interstate 35 from the north. When they pass me they usually can be picked up by stations in the Twin Cities from here on south. 

Thanks,

Noel 

WB0VGI

Harris, MN

[Tom Hayward]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 9:55 AM, Noel Petit <petit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Would love to have your comments and improvements. You can see this thing

Have you tried Dire Wolf ( https://home.comcast.net/~wb2osz/site/ ) in
place of Soundmodem? It has some fancier algorithms that allow it to
decode more packets. I've never tried it with Aprx.

Tom KD7LXL

[Noel Petit]

Tom:

Installed Dire Wolf and it works with the same hardware. Nice system. Seems to install quite a bit easier now that I have the USB and sound configuration set.

Just a couple of notes on the Dire Wolf installation notes:

Thanks, 

Noel

WB0VGI

[Noel Petit]

Forgot to post notes:

Has you install libasound2-dev twice (only need it once)

Have to modify /home/pi/Desktop to create link to /usr/share/applications/direwolf.desktop

And modify direwolf.desktop if you want it to find the .conf file (and turn off silly colors)

/usr/local/share/direwolf not created (or populated) had to do that manually

Left direwolf.conf in /home/pi/aprx/direwolf (desktop icon expects it in /home/pi) 

[Noel J Petit]

Tom:

I have DireWolf running on the same Raspberry Pi and it was a snap with
all the USB audio and GPIO stuff already set up.

Do you have any source of documentation on the output stream to the
terminal on DireWolf? There are [ig] [0] [0L] and [0H] packets but I
cannot find what those mean. I can surmise that [ig] is from aprsis but
and the 0 is channel 0 but L and H are baffling.

Noel Petit
WB0VGI

[David Ranch]

Hello Noel,

Most of those items are described in the Direwolf User Guide - http://home.comcast.net/~wb2osz/Version%201.0/User-Guide.pdf
--
Magenta for transmitted data. In this case, each line is preceded by the radio channel and priority. 0 for the first channel, 1 for the second if used. “H” means high priority for digipeated packets. “L” is for lower priority packets originating at this station.
--

--David