Ham radio

Planned, and a while off. Ham radio is coming in firmware 1.3.0 at the earliest. This section describes the design as it stands; nothing on it can be installed yet.

Before the internet, bulletin boards were already on the air. Amateur radio operators ran them over packet radio, and they still do: a network of nodes, linked by radio and by the internet, where a caller connects with their callsign instead of a telnet client.

A µnleashed board belongs on that network. This section is about getting it there.

How a board meets the packet world

The board itself never touches the radio. A small Linux computer beside it is the radio's modem, the fragile part, with packet software that has been doing it for years, and everything BBS stays on the board:

• A 2 m FM radio with a mic or data jack, and the audio from its speaker or data socket.
• A sound card interface, such as a Digirig, between the radio and the computer: audio both ways, and the push-to-talk line.
• A small Linux board, an Orange Pi or similar, running Direwolf, the software modem that turns tones into AX.25 frames, linbpq, the node that owns the sessions, the routing and the links to other nodes, and a small gateway service.
• A docking radio, an ESP32 on the Linux board's USB, which carries each caller to the µnleashed board over ESP-NOW, callsign first.

The board's side is coming in firmware 1.3.0. Accounts are made only over telnet or SSH; a ham with an account sets an RF passphrase in PROFILE and logs in over the air by answering a challenge on five random characters of it, different each time; any other callsign, N0CALL for one, is a guest who can read the forums, chat and see WHO, so the ham port doubles as a demo and a place for a QSO. No main password is ever sent over the air.

Projects

Packet Radio Node: KE9CXN's build

More ham radio pages will join this one as they are built.