Categories
Ham Radio

APRS, soundmodem, xastir and recovery of old info

[Today’s run: Watson Road]

We had a good Memorial Day today.  Had the relatives over to our house and had a great time.  There were 10 of us in the house and everyone got along ok.  That’s a nice thing.

I spent some time yesterday and again today on my ham radio laptop.  This thing is an old IBM Thinkpad from 1999-2000.  It has less than 200K of memory.  I’m running a light version of Debian Linux on it called antiX.  It doesn’t have enough memory to run a browser, but it will run an X-window desktop without too much trouble.

I’ve been getting more into VHF CW/SSB and I wanted to have a means to see if the band is open to longer distance conversations.  So I decided to install APRS software so that I could receive APRS location packets and map them on my screen.  That would show me what directions are open from this location.

I am using the internal sound card and a program called soundmodem to do the TNC/demodulating chores.  Then I am using the xastir program to do the mapping.

I’ve done all of this before.  I couldn’t remember how I had done it. But I did remember that I made note of it in a posting to a usenet bulletin board.  Today I found that posting with google groups.  Followed the info there, and sure enough, it works.

I really like having the internet around.