On Monday 05 November 2007 18:46:31 Bruce Robertson wrote:
Hey, Bob:
I'm a Linux user, too. You're in luck: the xastir program is one of the best for APRS, and it runs under X11. Any post Pentium III machine with a sound card can do the demodulating of 1200 AFSK pretty easily. There is ax.25 packet built into many kernels as an option, and there are a good number of possibilities for decoding the audio. So with a bit of Linux hacking and the cheapest of all 2m ht's, you can have a great APRS station.
When I last set up a Linux machine to do this, most of the demodulators were not user-space; in the Windows world, they are. I'm not sure if that's changing in Linux these days.
As it happens, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 on a new machine at work and noticed the raft of ham radio applications that are available with this distro. I look forward to the day that phaseIV_beacon_demodulator is among them!
Soundmodem which is a soundcard modem for both 1200 afsk and 9600 fsk is now user-space and available in the deb/ubuntu repositories. Soundmodem and Xastir will let you work APRS in linux without buying a TNC. MixW will also run under Wine.
73, Lee-KU4OS