aprs-pigate

Prebuilt Raspberry Pi image for running a HAM radio APRS Internet Gateway using direwolf and rtl-sdr

Feature List

⭐ Pre-compiled direwolf and rtl-sdr library

⭐ Pre-configured cron job runs every minute to make sure direwolf is running

⭐ Logrotate keeps text file logs for the last 14 days and auto deletes older logs

⭐ Works out-of-the-box receive-only igate with the rtl-sdr v3 kit.

⭐ Easily configured for digipeater operation with a usb sound card connected to a radio

Getting Started

Installation

1. Download & Flash the image to an SD card
2. Insert SD card into a computer and load your wpa_supplicant.conf into boot if you are using wifi, and drop in a direwolf.conf with your callsign and password. You can use any custom direwolf config file here, enabling many different hardware configurations!
3. Insert into a raspberry pi with RTL-SDR plugged into USB, and power up! If everything was configured correctly, in about 5 minutes you should see it pop up on aprs.fi.

Once the pi is running, it should be available on your network with hostname aprs-pigate and accessible via SSH pi@aprs-pigate using the default raspberry password. It is a good idea to change this once logged in, or disable passwords altogether and use SSH keys, which you can do by modifying the user-data file accessible on the boot partition after flashing.

Viewing Dire Wolf Output

The startup script creates a screen and executes the startup script pigate-start.sh. If at any time you want to explore the logs, you can ssh into your pigate and run the command screen -r direwolf. CTRL+C to leave the screen.

Logs are also written to /home/pi/aprslogs/aprs.log. You can view these with commands like less or tail, and generally may be easier to work with than the direwolf screen.

Customizing the Start Script

If you are setting up a digipeater, you can disable the Software Defined Radio by creating an empty file DISABLE_SDR and placing it into the boot folder of your SD card along with direwolf.conf. See the pigate-start.sh startup script for more details.

Contributing & Development

This project uses the following dependencies:

• Docker for Mac >= 2.3.2.0 (currently in edge)
• packer-build-arm-image in this repo I use the public docker image, but you can checkout this repo if you need to customize the build environment and build a custom docker image
• flash I use this to set a custom hostname on each flash, and is what is referenced in Makefile. However, you can flash the images using any conventional method.

Run make build to start building your first image.