On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 01:17 PM, k9wkj wrote:

I can install a receive only setup at the very finest spot in the county (at the tippy top of a 300ft tower on a 400ft ridge via a receive only VHF stick?
on a multicoupler. this site is on our clubs intranet (it has internet, but using our network, we have wide area VHF machine there as well)
so utilizing that great receiver, we should be able to hear many if not all of the devices on RF.

Do I have the correct understanding of the issue?
? ?Your "best site" can only be receive only, so you cannot use it for the "best TX coverage".? This site does have network capability.
? ?On the other hand, you have other sites (also with network capability) that you want to take that receive data and "DIGI" to RF.
My suggestion:
? ?Make your "best" receive only site send the audio over UDP on 7355 to an instance of Direwolf that can transmit.
? ?Since the UDP audio is a normal input, Direwolf will evaluate it for normal DIGI rules, and if met, DIGI the packet.

? ? ADEVICE0 UDP:7355 default? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? This will receive the "remote" audio and the TX will be the?
This will work, but only with audio from the remote site.? You have no audio from the attached receiver (transceiver).
If that is acceptable, this is a good solution.
So, if W9CVA-13 transmits a packet with a path of WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1 and it is received by the receive only antenna (was W9CVA-11 - simple RTL can do this easily),
The audio is sent over UDP:73555 and?actually received/decoded at W9CVA-10.? If W9CVA-10 is set to DIGI the packet, it gets sent out from that site.
W9CVA (you indicate it has internet) would also inject it to APRS-IS, so that is covered as well.
I am not sure how many sites can receive the UDP?audio from the same source.

If you need W9CVA to also handle local RF (that the "bets site" may not hear), you could try to 'double up" on the audio device.
This would require a different device.??I have seen this work with some things, but never tried it with Direwolf.? It may give you a "device unavailable" type error.
? ?ADEVICE1 plughw:1,0? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? If plughw:1,0 is the same as default, this might work with no issue.

-------
Rob KB8RCO

开云体育

Andrew,
I guess I am trying to understand why I cant get position packets from W9CVA-13 (a FT3dr) which gets heard by W9CVA-11 (receive only gate) and sends that position report to APRS.IS? does not get repeated by W9CVA-10, even though -10 can not hear it directly.-10 does receive the report from APRS.IS.
the behavior I am trying to exhibit is desired in this case?
W9CVA-10 does not hear as well as we would like, that is a function of its site.
we need to be able to hear HTs and those little 1 watt trackers and some phones sending position reports
to support a county wide event at the end of May
I can install a receive only setup at the very finest spot in the county (at the tippy top of a 300ft tower on a 400ft ridge via a receive only VHF stick?
on a multicoupler. this site is on our clubs intranet (it has internet, but using our network, we have wide area VHF machine there as well)
so utilizing that great receiver, we should be able to hear many if not all of the devices on RF.

I will mess with some filtering and see if that helps
the confounding thing being, even if configured wrongly, it isnt changing the behavior?
My last out here maybe to run a UDP stream from the remote to channel 1 and pass it to channel 0.

my brain hurts

de k9wkj

开云体育

开云体育

Again, the _normal_design of an I-gate is not to do that. Are you referring to local APRSdroid and aprs.fi-on-iOS clients that don't _have_ 2-meter radios attached to them? Well, that is a problem, since these are not amateur radio stations (they are in the commercial cellular telephone service). You would have to configure your I-gate to forcibly transmit such stations (without forcibly transmitting other stations that do have direct RF connectivity). If your I-gate supports supplemental Tx filtering, there are some options you can try. However, the phone apps tend to make themselves hard to identify, because they probably use MicE packet format, which does not contain a tocall value that could be matched by the u/ filter. But the u/ filter doesn't support a range limit anyway, so if that worked, you would get

Morning Andrew
well this is not about the fact it is not sending distant stuff over RF, I dont want it to.
it is that it wont send locally generated traffic over RF unless it comes in on RF
I need it to do that, as even if it is not a permanent setup, it needs to fill in the holes
I opened up the gate radius to try and get traffic to be transmitted
things are not very well covered around here so I normally ran the digi at a 50km radius which?
gives a bit of overlap with a big digi well to the northwest of us, but I never noticed it was not working as expected

FYI we use YAAC and Direwolf as a receive only standalone to populate a display on the wall of our
ARES tralier

de k9wkj

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of k9wkj

On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 03:59 PM, David Ranch wrote:
That is way too broad. You should not be transmitting over RF all traffic within a 80km >>diameter.

thats the trouble it doesnt transmit anything unless it hears it on RF

And that is how a Tx I-gate is supposed to work. Not flooding the local channel with extraneous and irrelevant packets from far away, but only transmitting traffic destined for an RF station heard by that I-gate. See the I-gating rules on

For example, if someone 80km away is sending an APRS text message addressed to someone else 80km away, why is that relevant to your _local_ RF environment? Now, if they were sending the text message to someone within 1km of your I-gate (and _heard_ by your I-gate), then it makes sense, as your I-gate might be the only path from the Internet to that RF-only station.

APRS is meant to be a local tactical network. Traffic out of RF range (or Aloha circle) of the local RF stations is not relevant unless it is explicitly addressed to a local station. And, with a 1200-baud transmission rate and issues with packet collisions, you really can't handle more than about 50 to 80 unique stations (depending on transmission rates) before the local channel is saturated.

If _you_ want to hear distant (non-locally-tactical) traffic, then _you_ need to make the Internet connection, not expect someone else to clog the local RF channel forwarding all that stuff to you.

Hope that helps you understand why your I-gate is working the way it does (and the way it was designed).

Andrew, KA2DDO
author of YAAC

On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 03:59 PM, David Ranch wrote:

That is way too broad.? You should not be transmitting over RF all traffic within a 80km diameter.

thats the trouble? ?it doesnt transmit anything unless it hears it on RF
toggling on some debug flags
this is W9CVA-13? coming over the network

I’m making an APRS beaconer with an Alinco DR-140 radio, a tone-key radio-to-soundcard interface (page 6 of ) and a Debian Bullseye computer with audio, that hosts direwolf.? The PTT part is giving me trouble.? To test the interface, I’m emulating the sound card output with my phone playing Spotify, but I get no activity on the PTT line.? Besides something being wrong with the circuit, an obvious mistake would be a wrong pinout on the RJ-45 microphone jack.? Am I right to assume that UP means transmit and DOWN means receive?? Also I’m assuming the PTT ground is the MIC ground.

From the Alinco DR-140 Service Manual, page 39:		Tone-keyed soundcard interface
DR-140 microphone jack	8 ??UP 7 ??GROUND 6 ??MIC 5 ??MIC GROUND 4 ??PTT 3 ??NC 2 ??DOWN 1 ??5vdc	TX audio to radio ground ? PTT ground PTT ? from radio receiver audio 5vdc
?	?	?

?

Have I properly mapped the outputs of the interface to the radio?

开云体育

Hello k9wkj,

1.? ? ?Ok.. just to confirm, this setup you're using is NOT using an SDR for RX correct?
correct it is a Midland LMR rig with a RA interface on a OrangePi One,? been doing it thing for several years

Ok

2.? ?When you say "the server", do you mean APRS-IS?
yes APRS-IS

Ok

3.? ?What traffic are you expecting to be transmitted from APRS-IS to RF?
anything that is incoming from within that 80Km radius including W9CVA-13 which comes in but does not go out over RF
there is plenty of incoming

That is way too broad.? You should not be transmitting over RF all traffic within a 80km diameter.?

--David
KI6ZHD

David,

here is the tail of /var/tmp/dw-start.log

good day David??
will address in order
1.? ? ?Ok.. just to confirm, this setup you're using is NOT using an SDR for RX correct?
correct it is a Midland LMR rig with a RA interface on a OrangePi One,? been doing it thing for several years
2.? ?When you say "the server", do you mean APRS-IS?
yes APRS-IS
3.? ?What traffic are you expecting to be transmitted from APRS-IS to RF?
anything that is incoming from within that 80Km radius including W9CVA-13 which comes in but does not go out over RF
there is plenty of incoming

David,

Thanks for your reply. The shell script I refer to is one I wrote that simply runs:

bash -c 'rtl_fm -f 144.39M - | direwolf -c igate.conf -r 24000 -D 1 -' &

And that is the corrected version of the shell script, which now runs great from a command prompt. I still have to get it set up to run at startup or using crontab. I'm somewhat happy for now, and it looks like other users jumped in here for help with a similar issue, so that's great!

Thanks everyone for your replies and help.

开云体育

Hello k9wkj,

unrelated to my other response today

Ok.. just to confirm, this setup you're using is NOT using an SDR for RX correct?

our digi works just fine with traffic it receives over RF even handles TT traffic both ways
it repeats the traffic on RF and sends it out to the server

When you say "the server", do you mean APRS-IS?

but it does not TX any traffic that comes through the gate
here is a example using 2 of our FT3 HTs

What traffic are you expecting to be transmitted from APRS-IS to RF?? You have the setting "IGFILTER m/80" which means it will only transmit APRS messages which is what most users should use.? You do NOT want to transmit everything being heard from APRS-IS onto RF as that's not the intention of an Igate.

W9CVA-14 audio level = 28(11/11)? ?[NONE]? ?_||||||__

[0.3] W9CVA-14>T4UV4R,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1:`w2rl :[/`"6r}_0<0x0d>

MIC-E, Human, Yaesu FT3D, In Service

N 44 56.4200, W 091 22.8600, 0 MPH, course 30, alt 896 ft

[0H] W9CVA-14>T4UV4R,W9CVA-10*,WIDE2-1:`w2rl :[/`"6r}_0<0x0d>

?

[ig>tx] W9CVA-13>T4UV4R,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1,qAO,W9CVA-11:`w2rl!`[/`"6y}_0

-14 was over RF
-13 was over the net

Line #1 above shows a RF packet heard from W9CVA
Line #2 above shows the line #1 heard packet being sent to the APRS-IS network
Line #3 about showing a packet from W9CVA-11 being transmitted on RF.? What is -11?

even though it was gated ig>tx it does not transmit

Try starting direwolf with PTT, Igate, and filtering debugging.? This is done using the "-doif".? From the resulting output, hopefully you can see what is happening.

here is the relevant sections of direwolf.conf
I have been banging on this for 2 days? and cant see straight!! I honestly did not know it wasnt working as all the RF gets repeated

?

DIGIPEAT 0 0 ^WIDE[3-7]-[1-7]$|^TEST$ ^WIDE[12]-[12]$ TRACE

#FILTER 0 1 t/wn

TXDELAY 4

IGSERVER noam.aprs2.net

IGLOGIN W9CVA-10 xxxx

?

IGTXVIA 0 WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1

IGFILTER m/80

#FILTER IG 0 t/m

#FILTER IG 1 t/wn

IGTXLIMIT 5 15


I know it is a typo or a misconfig as i am kind of dangerous that way

What are you saying is a typo?? Are you saying you are intentionally gating all APRS-IS traffic to RF?? If so, please do NOT do this.? It will effectlvely damage the local 144.390 channel which does NOT help as well as it can burn out your radio's finals due to being constantly used.

--David
KI6ZHD

开云体育

Hello K9WKJ,

having the same trouble with a dongle not behaving in the script
it will run for forever with this
rtl_fm -f 144.39M -g 30 -p 75 -o 4 - | direwolf -c sdr.conf -n 1 -a 30 -T %H:%M:%S -r 24000 -D 1 -b 16 -

Ok.. that's good.

digiremote@orangepione:~$ ./dw-start.sh

Direwolf in GUI mode start up

DISPLAY=:0

Did not find an X terminal emulator.? Reverting to CLI mode

-----------------------

Direwolf in CLI mode start up

There is a screen on:

12244.direwolf (03/16/2023 12:37:22 PM) (Detached)

1 Socket in /run/screen/S-digiremote.

If you look in the dw-start.sh script, all additional details go to the LOG file set as /var/tmp/dw-start.log .?? Do you see any errors in there?

--David

unrelated to my other response today
our digi works just fine with traffic it receives over RF even handles TT traffic both ways
it repeats the traffic on RF and sends it out to the server
but it does not TX any traffic that comes through the gate
here is a example using 2 of our FT3 HTs

having the same trouble with a dongle not behaving in the script
it will run for forever with this
rtl_fm -f 144.39M -g 30 -p 75 -o 4 - | direwolf -c sdr.conf -n 1 -a 30 -T %H:%M:%S -r 24000 -D 1 -b 16 -

but if I stick that into dw-start.sh, or just the stock SDR example
it appears to bomb with no errors
screen sees its PID but it bombs after

开云体育

Hello Paul,

I can run from a command prompt as the pi user all day long, but I'll be damned if I can't figure out how to run this on startup.

When you say you can run things ok from a command prompt, can you say explicitly what command you're running?

I see references to screens, tmux, crontab, shell scripts, etc. I hope not to waste everyone's time but I really some hand-holding here. My shell script won't do anything from a command prompt except return to a command prompt. Using ps or top, I don't see direwolf or rtl_fm running.

What shell script are you running?? Is this something you wrote or are you talking about the dw-start.sh script??? To troubleshoot a shell script, try opening two terminal windows.? In window #1, open an editor and load in the shell script you're trying to run.? In window #2, copy and paste each line from the shell script line by line into this window and see where things break.? Once you have an error, send us the details on this list and we'll help you out.

--David
KI6ZHD