Planet FSFE

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-07

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on writing unit tests for aprsisd.

I’ve added a few unit tests to test the generation of the TNC2 format packets from AX.25 packets to upload to APRS-IS. There’s still some todo entries there as I’ve not made up packets for all the cases I wanted to check yet.

These are the first unit tests I’ve written for HamBSD and it’s definitely a different experience compared to writing Python unit tests for example. The framework for the tests uses bsd.regress.mk(5). The tests are C programs that include functions from aprsisd.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-06

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on gating from the Internet to RF.

In the morning I cleaned up the mess I made yesterday with escaping the non-printable characters in packets before uploading them. I ran some test packets through and both Xastir and aprs.fi could decode them so that must be the correct way to do it.

I also added filtering of generic station queries (?APRS?) and IGate queries (?IGATE?). When an IGate query is seen, aprsisd will now respond with a station capabilities packet. The packet is not very exciting as it only contains the “IGATE” capability right now, but at least it does that.

HamBSD Development Log 2020-05-05

I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on converting AX.25 packets to the TNC2 format used by APRS-IS.

I fixed the path formatting to include the asterisks for used path entries. Before packets would always appear to APRS-IS to have been heard directly, which gave some impressive range statistics for packets that had in fact been through one or two digipeaters.

A little more filtering is now implemented for packets. The control field and PID are verified to ensure the packets are APRS packets.

Contact

• iain@learmonth.me
• irlxyz
• irlxyz