Hi everyone.
I really enjoy the aspects of Amateur Radio that involve connecting our radios to a computer. That includes decoding telemetry from the long list of cubesats in orbit now as well as digital modes like packet. It's been great to have the ISS digipeater back in service, plus PSAT has been working well lately.
I normally use UISS on Windows for my packet operations but thought it would be fun to try to find the most simple method of doing the same thing on linux, in particular a Raspberry Pi. I know there are linux packet apps, but I was looking for something as lite as possible that was point-and-click like UISS.
This is important... please note that this is NOT a turnkey, step-by-step how to. But rather, I wanted to share my findings so that anyone comfortable with linux/Pi basics could install a couple of pieces of software and edit a few text files.
Since I wanted to demo how it actually works, I recorded a screen session on my Raspberry Pi. It's not meant to be fancy and has no audio, but the "narration" is done with text on the screen so that you can pause the video at any time you wish to read or take notes. The video is at:
http://www.qsl.net/k/k4kdr//video/2018-09-02--RPi-APRS-demo.mp4
... and all the files AS I USE THEM can be found at:
http://www.qsl.net/k/k4kdr//downloads/pkt/
... please note, if you'd like to duplicate my little experiment, it's critical that you do the following:
--determine which audio device connects to your radio & setup a proper .CONF file for Direwolf
--if you're not using VOX for PTT (i.e., Signalink), then determine which USB or serial devices keys your PTT & put that in the Direwolf .CONF file
--edit each and every .SH script file & replace my call sign with yours, plus edit the wording to suit yourself
... so, obviously not as easy as UISS on Windows but for portable use, a Raspberry Pi might be easier to carry than a full-size laptop.
Final note, while I did the video demo on a Pi, this setup works equally well on any linux computer as long as you review your Direwolf .CONF file and all the scripts to make sure they are using syntax that is proper for your system.
For anyone already familiar with the linux or Pi environment, I hope my learnings might save you some time. I know this all sounds complicated, but it's really not... only a few things to configure and you're up and running!
I used this setup on a PSAT pass the other day and was digipeated several times. Here's a screen shot of findu.com from that pass:
http://www.qsl.net/k/k4kdr//images/2018-09-01--PSAT-Pi.png
I hope this might be interesting to someone. Of course please contact me if you give it a try and have any questions.
-Scott, K4KDR