Members’ Projects

Anastasia KI5KGE and her Dad Del AG5QU with their VHF j-pole project antenna! Everyone had a fun time at the picnic visiting and hearing all about this great father/daughter project! Signal reports from hams in the area when operating at the home QTH and at John Stiff Park were positive – Fine business, indeed 😄

Raspberry Pi Set up for Packet

RPI setup – Dave Opitz, WA5X

I have a Raspberry Pi computer with a wifi dongle connected to my wireless network. This Raspberry Pi stands alone without a keyboard or monitor connected to it. There is a USB to Serial cable plugged into the RPI. The address of the USB Serial Port cable is “dev/ttyUSB0”

I use the program “minicom” installed in the RPI to connect to the KPC3 tnc to run Packet.

In order to open minicom and connect to the tnc at the proper serial protocol you must give the RPI the command “minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 9600” This command tells the RPI to open “minicom” and connect it to the usb-serial cable that has the address “/dev/ttyUSB0”. The command “-b 9600” opens the serial connection at 9600 baud. Your tnc may require a different baud rate.

The command “minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 9600” connects me to the TNC but is hard for me to remember so I have created an ALIAS of that command called “TNC” to type that command for me.

In order to create an alias on the Raspberry Pi you need to create the file “.bash_aliases” in the directory “/home/pi” if it does not already exist.

Location of File: /home/pi/.bash_aliases

Contents of File: alias tnc=”minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 9600″

Now by turning on the Raspberry Pi and logging in with your user name and password a single command “TNC” will set up communications and connect to your packet tnc or any other serial device you might connect to the Raspberry Pi.

I use the program “Putty” to SSH (Secure Socket Shell) into the Raspberry Pi on my wireless network by selecting “SSH” and entering the ip address of the Raspberry Pi. By doing so I am presented with the username prompt followed by the password prompt just as if I had logged onto the RPI with a keyboard and monitor. This system allows me to log into the KPC3 from any computer on my network. It may be possible to connect remotely from anywhere on the internet but I am not set up to do that and not sure how to set it up. Also don’t need the security headache associated with a connection like that.

For connecting to a TNC that is within cable length from the computer it is much more simple. You can use Putty or any other serial communication program to talk to the TNC as long as you provide it with the com port and baud rate and serial protocol required by the TNC.

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