Packet Radio, Part 4 (Soldering, and Sending/Receiving APRS)

Ok, time to roll up our sleeves, and get things hooked up.  Or rather, getting past my apprehension of soldering :/.

First step, getting the DIN socket hooked up to the breadboard.  When ordering, I looked around all of the various DIN sockets Jameco had to offer, and none of them looked like they were breadboard-friendly, so I kinda figured I'd be trying to solder wires to the pins.  But that didn't go very well; my hands aren't bad, but by the time I got 4 wires soldered, I had at least one solder bridge, and too much of a smell of burning plastic.

So I took a step back and reached for something a bit more doable.  I cut an audio cable in half and soldered up the wires to breadboard jumpers, tested the connections with my ohmmeter, and wrapped them in electrical tape.  Small successes are still successes.

At that point, I cut my losses with the DIN socket, cut my DIN cable in h (alf, and soldered up jumpers to those wires as well.  With that done, I could plug everything into the breadboard, wire up the circuit, plug the other end of the DIN into my FT-8900R, and try things out.

So I turned on RasPi, fired up Direwolf, and YAAC, and OMFG lookit that, I've got my icon in the right place on APRS.fi!  Now THAT is cool.

Hmm, except I can send but not receive?  Were there radio settings that affected that?  Poked around 8900, and all that looked fine; it's set (and defaults) to sending on the main transceiver, so that's good.  Looked around Direwolf settings, and that all seemed fine.  Oh yeah, audio levels really matter for Direwolf, and RasPi's were set way too high.  Or off.  Or something.  Fixed that, and packets started rolling in.

Which (given that I'm being called for dinner) is enough excitement for one session.  Will leave things running and see what I get.  Up next will be seeing what kind of fun I can have with APRS via YAAC, but then there's what got me started on this, which is connecting to packet BBS's.

Edit: who am I kidding, I'm sitting here after dinner, watching the packets roll in, and poking around all of the YAAC windows.  Edited the (Transmit tab) beacon destination, from APRS to APDW13 to indicate Direwolf (it also had APJYC1, but I missed what that meant until after I had APDW13 being sent out).

YAAC.  I like the "heard stations" display.  Direwolf's packet display is nicer (easier to read) than YAAC's raw window, but maybe there's a better display in there somewhere.  At some point, I think I hit "locate", which rather than centering the map, started sending messages out to a station I hadn't heard in an hour; confusing, but once I cleared the outgoing messages list, it settled down.

Probably time to do some reading up on APRS, as well as YAAC, before going much further.