It really doesn’t feel like it was that long ago since I wrote about packet communications, however it is just over 9 years already, which is frightening for a variety of reasons.
Packet radio is close to my heart as providing a glimpse of computer communications prior to the advent of what we now know as the Internet. Most if not all of the pre-internet telecommunications infrastructure in Australia now only exists in museums or has been scrapped for metal. We’re at least one demographic generation in that have never heard a dialup modem handshake before outside of a YouTube video.
This may be the second time I have posted about packet radio, but this time I will be taking a much deeper dive.
Hardware TNCs make things delightfully plug-and-play easy and provided you have a serial to USB converter, chances are you can just plug the TNC in, connect to the COM port with an app like Putty and you are pretty much good to go.
I’ve played around a fair bit with my PacComm TNC-320 and it makes for a cheap-and-cheerful way to get started with packet radio with minimal technical knowledge. However as my desire to offer a packet radio node in my locality has increased, I really needed something that could provide accessibility for others, and thats where I got a bit more serious about understanding how to set up a TNC-X Pi hat that I had purchased and used more than a few years ago.
One of the things I have found however is that a lot of details around setting up a full packet radio node with all the trimmings and a BBS is pretty scarce. Documentation online seems to assume you already have expert knowledge in packet operations and bulletin boards of the 90s.
With that in mind, I hope to spend several blog posts documenting and exploring all things packet radio so that others are able to learn from my mistakes 🙂
Setting up packet radio support in Linux
First of all, I am skipping the entire “This is how you set up a TNC-X Pi” – the product, like most TNCs is no longer available and I already have this configured. It does not really serve to explain that here, though you can read about it over in Internet Archive.
Easily the best guide to get a simple setup is over at Elite Mike’s website. Mike’s site provides instructions for:
- Installing the ax25 packages.
- Making sure the netrom kernel module is installed.
- Showing you how to set up the TNC and netrom ports.
- Creating systemd services for automatically starting ax25 services.
In addition to the instruction on Mike’s site, I have a small shell script to run on boot to set up some other services:
ifconfig ax0 44.136.224.12
/usr/sbin/ax25d
/usr/sbin/mheardd
/usr/sbin/beacon -c VK7BEN-1 1 "VK7BEN-1 Packet Node QE37qd Lindisfarne, Tasmania - RasPi TNC - https://www.vk7ben.au"- The ifconfig command attaches an IP Address to the ax0 interface, which is assigned to me by the AMPR Project.
- Starting the ax25d daemon. this is needed for my node to respond to incoming connection.requests and to route incoming requests based on their SSID. Some information on how this works can be found on Kevin KK5DCT’s website.
- Loading of the Mheard daemon to be able to track last heard packet nodes.
- setting on the beacon service to regularly beacon my node every 30 mins with information.
Assuming everything is set up correctly, connecting to VK7BEN-1 via ax25 will result in access to a basic netrom node:
LinuxNode v0.3.2 (pi-tnc.vk7ben.ampr.org)
login: VK7BEN
Password:
LINUX:VK7BEN-1 Welcome to pi-tnc.vk7ben.ampr.org network node
Type ? for a list of commands. help <commandname> gives a description
of the named command.
--
cmd:?
LINUX:VK7BEN-1 Commands:
?, Bye, Connect, Escape, Finger, Help, HOst, Info, Links, Mheard
NLinks, Nodes, PIng, Ports, Routes, Status, TAlk, Telnet, Users, ZConnect
ZOrk, ZTelnet
cmd:
And following Richard KE7ABC’s blog post. I was able to set up Zork. Because what packet radio setup would be complete without a game? 🙂
Anyway, this should wrap up the first of a few posts around packet radio. I hope you’ll take the time to follow me on this journey.