Wikis, Amateur Radio, and Debian

As I have been getting involved with amateur radio this year, I’ve been taking notes on what I’m learning about certain things: tips from people on rigging up a bicycle antenna to achieve a 40-mile range, setting up packet radio in Linux, etc. I have long run a personal, private wiki where I put such things.

But I really wanted a convenient place to put this stuff in public. There was no reason to keep it private. In fact, I wanted to share with others what I’ve learned. And, as I wanted to let others add their tips if they wish, I set up a public MoinMoin instance on . So far, most of my attention has focused on the amateur radio section of it

This has worked out pretty well for me. Sometimes I will cut and paste tips from emails into there, and then after trying them out, edit them into a more coherent summary based on my experiences.

Now then, on to packet radio and Debian. Packet radio is a digital communications mode that runs on the amateur radio bands. It is a routable, networking protocol that typically runs at 300bps, 1200bps, and 9600bps. My packet radio page gives a better background on it, but essentially AX.25 — the packet protocol — is similar to a scaled-down TCP/IP. One interesting thing about packet is that, since it can use the HF bands, can have direct transcontinental wireless links. More common are links spanning 30-50 miles on VHF and UHF, as well as those going across a continent on HF.

Linux is the only operating system I know of that has AX.25 integrated as a first-class protocol in the kernel. You can create AX.25 sockets and use them with the APIs you’re familiar with already. Not only that, but the Linux AX.25 stack is probably the best there is, and it interfaces easily with TCP/IP — there are global standards for encapsulating TCP/IP within AX.25 and AX.25 within UDP, and both are supported on Linux. Yes, I have telnetted to a machine to work on it over VHF. Of Linux distributions, Debian appears to have the best AX.25 stack built-in.

The AX.25 support in Linux is great, but it’s rather under-documented. So I set up a page for packet radio on Linux. I’ve had a great deal of fun with this. It’s amazing what you can do running a real networking protocol at 300bps over long-distance radio. I’ve had real-time conversations with people, connected to their personal BBS and sent them mail, and even use AX.25 “nodes” (think of them as a kind of router or bridge; you can connect in to them and the connect back out on the same or different frequencies to extend your reach) to connect out to systems that I can’t reach directly.

MoinMoin has worked out well for this. It has an inviting theme and newbie-friendly interface (I want to encourage drive-by contributions).

10 thoughts on “Wikis, Amateur Radio, and Debian

  1. Anonymous says:

    You might find it somewhat disappointing that the current Debian kernel drops AX25.

    1. John Goerzen says:

      Which version is that? I’m running 2.6.32-5 and it’s still there.

      1. Anonymous says:

        Current 2.6.37 packages (starting at -rc4) have disabled X.25.

        1. John Goerzen says:

          Whoa. Any idea why?

      2. Anonymous says:

        (replying at this level because for some reason I can’t reply to your comment “Whoa. Any idea why?”.)

        According to the changelog:

        * Disable X.25 protocol and related drivers. This 10 year old experiment
        has stalled and is a source of security bugs.

        The “security bugs” refers to several recent security issues exacerbated by the ability to force obscure network protocols to autoload.

        1. John Goerzen says:

          From discussion on the debian-hams list, I believe all this means is that these things will be built as modules and not loaded as default.

  2. Ryan says:

    Does the FCC ban encryption on the ham bands still?

    1. Anonymous says:

      Yes.

    2. John Goerzen says:

      Yep, hence telnet (and the resulting excuse to learn about OPIE)

  3. ke7tdy says:

    thanks for taking the time to set up the pages … i am a ham and a linux guy, but i’ve not been able to figure out how to do my packet and pactor in ubuntu yet. . .

    i’m heading to your sites you mentioned an hope to learn because i’m sick of having to boot in to windows to check my pacekt/pactor msg’s …

    73
    ~j

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.