TL;DR: I got my amateur radio license, bought radios, joined a club, and want to hook up a radio to a computer, to do packet. These articles will document what I'm doing there, to get it all to work.
The show so far:
My club, SPARC, (or at least somebody at the club), is putting up a packet node. I have fond memories from the early 90's of playing with packet radio, so I'm keen to play along with this setup as well. Back in the day, I had a Kenwood 2m radio, a TNC of some flavor, all the cables connecting the two, to each other and to my computer, and was on the air. Yay, memories!
30 years later (cough), and I'd like to figure it all out again, and see what I can do. I have multiple computers, including a few Raspberry Pi's, and I'm of the mind that I should be able to get on the air with a software solution, instead of buying a TNC. I'm nothing if not cheap frugal.
So there's Direwolf. Somewhere over the past couple of years, I hooked up an antenna to my SDR dongle, to my laptop (running SDR#), to Direwolf, and was able to decode APRS packets. Pretty cool. I then hooked up APRSDroid to my Baofeng, and saw my base station displayed on aprs.fi, which was even more cool. But then I wandered off in other directions, and forgot about it.
My intent is to write up details about my efforts in blog posts, and collect the overall setup in this page.
Up next: my research efforts, to figure out this brave new world.
Footnote: Yeah, after a 10-year break :-o, I'm coming back to blogging. Like the rest of the world, I long ago headed over to "social media", and forgot about long-form posting, but over the past few years, lost my love for that as well. And since I have a project that I'd like to document, I'm coming back here. Maybe. Hopefully.
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