I’ve been tinkering with packet radio for a while using a Raspberry Pi computer (with a serial port “hat”), a PK-232 Terminal Node Controller, and a Kenwood TM-G707 transceiver for 2-meters. Although there’s not a lot of activity in the local area, it’s been interesting and educational; but one thing that has been bugging me is that I haven’t had a good terminal program to use. So I decided to try what I thought would be a good program for the purpose: a MU* client.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For those who may not know, a MU* client is a network program designed for playing text-based role playing games (MUDs, MUSHes, MUCKs, and MOOs) harkening back to the early days of internet gaming. They usually have a split screen with a large window for displaying text from the game server, a smaller window for composing text and commands to send to the server, and built-in tools for highlighting text and manipulating incoming and outgoing text in various ways. Exactly what I wanted for packet radio. The client I selected is TinyFugue, which I’m already familiar with and is fully text-based so I can run it over an SSH link if I need to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first challenge is that these programs connect to the internet, not to a serial port. With some help and pointers from a few friends who are Linux-savvy (since this is on the Pi in this case), I was able to figure out how to bridge between the serial port and a network port on the Pi, and connect the client software to the local host address. It took a little tinkering when first turning on the TNC to get the baud rate set right, but once it configured, I was able to start talking to the TNC, and then to other radios in the local area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One minor hiccough I didn’t expect but should have in retrospect is that serial devices like TNCs are character-oriented, so the terminal programs used to communicate with them are also character-oriented. MU* servers, and therefore the clients used to connect to them, are line-<\/em>oriented. The difference is that a line is terminated by a carriage return, the same thing you get when you press the enter key. A terminal program will display characters as they come in, but the MU* client wants to wait until it sees a CR; the TNC sends it’s “cmd:” prompt as an unterminated string of characters (which is why the command you type appears the same line as the “cmd:” like you would expect) so it doesn’t show up by default unless you press enter a couple of times. And while some MU* servers send an unterminated command prompt when expecting input, I’m not very familiar with that type or how to configure for them, so I need to do a little more experimenting to get everything working right and reliably see everything that comes from the TNC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So my current plan is to set up another computer with a serial port and connect it to the Pi with a null-modem cable, and use PuTTY or another terminal program to type at the Pi and see exactly how the MU* client behaves, while researching how to configure the MU* client for better functionality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Should have more in a few days!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been tinkering with packet radio for a while using a Raspberry Pi computer (with a serial port “hat”), a PK-232 Terminal Node Controller, and a Kenwood TM-G707 transceiver for 2-meters. Although there’s not a lot of activity in the local area, it’s been interesting and educational; but one thing that has been bugging me […] →Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[7,8,9,10,11,12],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-packetradio","tag-linux","tag-packet","tag-packet-radio","tag-pk-232","tag-raspberry-pi","tag-tnc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ac0cw.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}