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RPiGate again
26 March 2016 | by For a few weeks I have been attempting to use an RTL-SDR and a raspberry Pi 2 as an APRS iGate. Dutifully following a number of tutorials I failed to ‘Kalibrate’ the dongle several times and so put it to one side. Today however I have managed to get the thing running. Not with the original tutorial but with a different application called ‘Direwolf’.
There are quite a few clever sods kicking about and the guy who pulled this together is no exception. John Langer,WB2OSZ has not only produced a cracking application but also one of the most straightforward and detailed installation documents as well. What I particularly liked was the way that there was a step followed by an explanation of what the step was meant to achieve. I’m no great linux fan, partly because I don’t understand what the hell is going on and more importantly for me, why its not doing what I thought it should do and why. This small success may point me more in that direction though.
More to the point see. I told you it was working!
2 Responses to “RPiGate again”
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I guess you tried pymultimonaprs? It takes a bit of setting up, but once it’s done, it just sits there and does it’s thing day-in-day-out without a complaint!
Calibration is only necessary if you don’t already know the PPM offset for that particular dongle – I have two of them, so I labelled each with their PPM offset so I know when I come back to them later what they are! A sure fire way to find out is to run one up in gQRX (or similar) and lock onto a repeater or similar that you know the frequency of – not an exact science, but neither is the kalibrate programme; that gave me different answers every time I ran it!
I did. It took a bit too much time to set up and confirm it was working. the aim issue was audio didn’t appear to be getting through to the application. Try as I might I wasn’t able to get to the bottom of it.
I could do with fining another method of determining the ppm offset that is a bit more novice friendly, or at least a way of logging the detail so it can be looked at later