Revisiting Packet Radio on a Raspberry Pi using Direwolf

It’s been a few years since I last played with Packet Radio on a Raspberry Pi, but I have been playing with the uz7ho soundcard software recently and have some packet APRS via the International Space Station.

Looking back at the Direwolf and ax25 setup I was playing with before, I couldn’t actually remember what the order of commands was to get things started up, despite still having it all still configured and installed on the same Pi that I used before. Assuming ax25 and Direwolf are installed and configured (see here and here), the steps to get ax25 up and running and connected are:

• Start direwolf with: “direwolf -t 0 -p”
• Note the /dev/pts/x value it returns on startup
• Run: “sudo kissattach /dev/pts/1 1” (where /dev/pts/1 matches the same value from direwolf startup)
• The second 1 is the network name from your axports file, like:

1 KK6DCT-5 19200 255 2 2m packet

Ensure direwolf.conf has the same callsign-ssid value, in my example here, KK6DCT-5

Ensure alsamixer has volume around 3/4 for your audio card

To find what audio card device you’re using, use: “axplay -l”. With a Signalink, this shows up as:

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
  Subdevices: 8/8
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
  Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
  Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
  Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
  Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
  Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
  Subdevice #7: subdevice #7
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: CODEC [USB Audio CODEC], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
  Subdevices: 0/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

The Signalink is card 1, subdevice 0, so the corresponding config in direwolf.conf for this device is:

ADEVICE  plughw:1,0

To summarize:

1. Start direwolf, grab the /dev/pts/x value
2. Start kissattach with the same /dev/pts/x value
3. Now you should be able to “call 1 nodename” and get a packet connection out via Direwolf to your radio.