Skip to content

N7APO Packet Radio Station

I have a simple, low power packet radio station set up in my garage. It's reliably connected to the handful of remaining packet radio stations in the Seattle area and can be used to forward messages.

View the station logs at packet.n7apo.com

Hardware

  • Kenwood TM-271 transceiver
  • Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
  • Signalink USB
  • Comet GP-1 antenna

Software

  • Direwolf as the software decoder
  • Pat for mail
  • Linux Amateur Radio tools

Power

The radio and computer are powered from a 12V battery which can be recharged via a solar suitcase.

Emergency communications

The Winlink system allows email to be relayed over the air to gateway stations which will in turn relay it to the internet. Regional fire stations and emergency management locations still maintain Winlink relays so in the event of a disaster it's still possible to send and receive email with zero additional infrastructure. I have the Raspberry Pi configured as its own access point so a cell phone can connect to it via wifi, access the web UI, and still communicate with the wider world.

Web interface

The web interface relies on the excellent ttyd which exposes a tty on the web. Requests spawn their own read-only tmux instance which shows some of the station logs.

Future projects

At some point there are other things to do:

  • move the service to the 44.0.0.0/8 amateur radio net
  • build out a BBS, also exposed on the web