How To reuse an old computer with a (serial) Baycom modem for a simple Packet Radio Station
The title basically says it all. I wanted to to give my old 386/25 PC a useful application near the
end of it's service life, and tried to turn it into a PR terminal.
I have had earlier experience with DOS, which was very easy to set up, so I thought it should be equally easy with Linux, considering that the kernel has all the AX.25 stuff implemented.
Not so.
It turned out to be a really bad and messy experience.
Most of the documentation (e.g. the AX25-HOWTO) is so hopelessly outdated and full of wrong information that it adds more to the confusion than it clarifies. Just one brief example: the AX25-HowTo talks about "insmod"ing modules which was already obsolete when I started using Linux in 1998, even though the HowTo claims to be from September 2001.
And that's only one of the moderate errors that is easy to recognize for an unsuspecting user. This and all the other inconsistencies were giving me the fits. In my eyes this document should rather be called a How-Not-To or a How-To-cramp-all-the wrongs-one-can-find-in-one-document.
With all those broken bits and pieces it took me several days to set up the system, with the kind help of a friend and some fellow Hams on the NG.
You may ask why I don't just go ahead updating it? Easy, I really don't know all the basics required. I am a Ham with a profound knowledge about electronics, but next to none about protocols and sockets and layers.
Well, now forget all this and read my Baycom-and-RH6.2-HOWTO instead (or download it here). This should get you on the air in (almost) no time and save you all the hassle and pitfalls I encountered. I have tried to keep it as simple but still informative as possible.
Note however that I do not really know in-depth what I was doing, the HowTo just describes the steps to get the system up and running and the modem on the air.
So don't even bother sending me email asking to elaborate, I will most likely not be in the position to give profound answers.
To make it even easier for you, I have collected all the necessary software so you can download it from one location, in the necessary versions, see my download page.
For some of the software, particularly the one that came as a tarball, I packed slightly modified RPMs for RedHat 6.2.
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