Here is how I run Pat with AX25. This assumes Direwolf can key your radio for 2M/ 1200 baud connections to local nodes. I’ve yet to get this actually working, as I live in hole which RF can’t seem to escape.

Run Direwolf, with APRS stuff commented out of the config file. The -p and -c flags are needed.

$sudo direwolf -p -c direwolf_noaprs.conf

This will give a symlink, such as:

Virtual KISS TNC is available on /dev/pts/1
Created symlink /tmp/kisstnc -> /dev/pts/1

Take note of the device number, in this case, /dev/pts/1 Bind the port to AX.25

$ kissattach /dev/pts/1 wl2k
AX.25 port wl2k bound to device ax0

Then, run pat. I use a bunch of arguments here, you don need to.

$pat --listen ardop,ax25,telnet http -a 0.0.0.0:8080

Open a browser, and load pat interface on :8080. Please note 0.0.0.0 allows connections from other machines, not just localhost which is useful for VPN.

You noticed that I included ardop in the config – this is a HF modem which needs separate command line arguments for configuration. Basic config is below. 8515 is the port, plughw is the USB sound card for I/O. Find the audio cards by typing aplay -l into the terminal

Download ardop here.

$./ardopc 8515 plughw:1,0 plughw:1,0

This is just notes for myself really, but part one can be found here.

Default path for sound files in Debian.  This path depends on your distro;
/usr/local/share/svxlink/sounds/en_US

What I have done to build custom modules into SVXlink is to use DTMF tones to trigger external scripts.  Those scripts are written in Bash or Python.

Drop a file in the following path, copy and paste below, edit as needed.  As you can see, toggling a DTMF tone will run a script and send me an eMail.
/usr/local/share/svxlink/events.d/local/Logic.tcl

###############################################################################
#
# Generic Logic event handlers (local extension)
#
###############################################################################
# This is the namespace in which all functions and variables below will exist.
#
namespace eval Logic {
# Executed when a DTMF command has been received
# cmd - The command
#
# Return 1 to hide the command from further processing is SvxLink or
# return 0 to make SvxLink continue processing as normal.
#
proc dtmf_cmd_received {cmd} {
global active_module
if {$active_module != "" && [string index $cmd 0] != "*"} {
return 0
}
if {[string index $cmd 0] == "*"} {
set cmd [string range $cmd 1 end]
}
if {$cmd == "99"} {
puts "Executing external command 99"
playMsg "Core" "relay4"
exec mail -a /home/revmook/test.text -s "DTMF command test 99" revmook at echoparklake dot clam < /dev/null &
return 1
}
if {$cmd == "98"} {
puts "Executing external command 98"
playMsg "Core" "relay3"
exec mail -a /home/revmook/test.text -s "DTMF command test 98" revmook at echoparklake dot clam < /dev/null &
return 1
}
if {$cmd == "97"} {
puts "Executing external command 97"
playMsg "Core" "relay2"
exec mail -a /home/revmook/test.text -s "DTMF command test 97" revmook at echoparklake dot clam < /dev/null &
return 1
}
if {$cmd == "96"} {
puts "Executing external command 96"
playMsg "Core" "relay1"
exec mail -a /home/revmook/test.text -s "DTMF command test 96" revmook at echoparklake dot clam < /dev/null &
return 1
}
return 0

External sounds for the above script go in this path.  Please note SVXlink is picky about the file format. I can’t recall what it is (mono 16 bit I think) but it will error out if things are not right.
/usr/local/share/svxlink/sounds/en_US/Core

This is going to be the first post in a series on how to setup an Echolink node using cheap hardware. Read more about Echolink here.

EchoLink allows licensed Amateur Radio stations to communicate with one another over the Internet, using streaming-audio technology.  The system allows worldwide connections to be made between stations, or from computer to station, greatly enhancing Amateur Radio’s communications capabilities.  There are more than 200,000 validated users worldwide — in 151 of the world’s 193 nations — with about 5,200 online at any given time.

The first thing we need to do is Install svxlink on a pi. These instructions assume you have a pi running already, and you can log into it with SSH.

Create the user “SVXLink”. The software will not compile corrctly without this user.
sudo adduser svxlink

Download and install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libgsm1 libgsm1-dev sigc++ libsigc++-1.2-5c2 libsigc++-1.2-dev libpopt0 libpopt-dev tcl8.4 tcl8.4-dev g++ subversion patch mutt libqt3-mt libqt3-mt-dev libqt3-headers libgcrypt11 libgcrypt11-dev libspeex1 libspeex-dev libboost-dev libasound2 libasound2-dev qt4-dev-tools cmake screen

Grab the source code.

sudo wget https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink/archive/master.tar.gz
sudo tar xvf master.tar.gz
sudo rm master.tar.gz

Build and install SVXLink

cd /usr/src/svxlink-master/src
mkdir build
cd /buiild
cmake ..
sudo make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig -v


Download sounds for your language:

cd /~
wget https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink-sounds-en_US-heather/releases/download/14.08/svxlink-sounds-en_US-heather-16k-13.12.tar.bz2
tar xvf svxlink-sounds-en_US-heather-16k-13.12.tar.bz2
sudo mkdir /usr/local/share/svxlink/sounds/en_US
sudo cp -a en_US-heather-16k/* /usr/local/share/svxlink/sounds/en_US
Please note that this path is different than anything that I could find on the ‘net. If you’re getting warnings like

*** WARNING: Could not find audio clip "deactivating" in context "Default"

*** WARNING: Could not find audio clip "name" in context "EchoLink"

then you need to find where SvxLink is looking for these files. The easiest way to do this is search for the ‘events.tcl’ file.

updatedb
locate events.tcl

You should be able to start svxlink from the command line, but maybe you will get a bunch of errors. We need to modify the config file, which defaults in /usr/local/etc/svxlink. More on this in another post.

A fuzzy picture of a thirsty bird and my Pi.  Note the binder clip which secures the SD card and the USB sound card.