Setting up Direwolf/Xastir on a Raspberry Pi

A long time ago I set up Soundmodem for Ubuntu. Recently, I tried setting up an igate using WB2OSZ’s Direwolf instead. Things are much nicer these days.

The Direwolf site includes a very nice guide to setting up a Raspberry Pi as an igate, so I won’t go over it here. Instead, this is just to record the steps I took to set up my Raspberry Pi v2 as an igate server.

1. Set up the Raspberry Pi to run Raspbian
2. Follow along with the setup guide:

sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio # I didn't need to do this since it wasn't installed, but better safe than sorry
sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev xastir # Note that I'm installing xastir at the same time - this is different from the direwolf guide
cd ~
git clone https://www.github.com/wb2osz/direwolf
cd direwolf
git checkout 1.2
make
sudo make install
make install-rpi
make install-conf

Next, make sure the sound card is plugged into USB (I used the bottom slot). When I plugged it in, the system rebooted, so it’s probably smart to shut down before plugging the sound card in. For a sound card, I used the Syba SD-CM-UAUD USB Stereo Audio Adapter, C-Media Chipset from Amazon.

From there, run
aplay -l
to see:
card 1: Device [C-Media USB Audio Device], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]


Now I know the device is card 1 device 0. We’re almost ready to edit direwolf.conf. First, though – something that wasn’t documented on the Direwolf site. Igates need a secret code so they can log into the tier 2 servers. It’s based on your callsign, and there’s a utility called callpass in Xastir that will compute it for you.

callpass {my-real-call}


This gives you a 5 or 6 digit integer that you should remember. I’ll call it {my-code}.

Now edit direwolf.conf:

1. uncomment ADEVICE plughw:1,0 – if you got a different number from aplay above, you might have to modify it.
2. change MYCALL NOCALL to MYCALL {my-real-call}-10. I used -10 because that’s the APRS SSID for igates. (APRS SSIDs are documented here.) In the direwolf.conf that I got, the NOCALL had a ^J after it; I had to take that out
3. uncomment IGSERVER noam.aprs2.net (maybe use a different server if you’re not in North America)
4. uncomment IGLOGIN and change it to IGLOGIN {my-real-call} {my code}
5. direwolf

Yay, you’re igating. But what’s around? Set up Xastir for that:

1. xastir
2. In the first menu that comes up, set your callsign to {my-real-call}-10 and (if desired) set your lat/long/position ambiguity
3. Interface -> Interface Control, Add, Networked AGWPE, Add. Leave Pass-code blank, save and Start. Now you’re getting APRS from over the air displayed on your Xastir maps.
4. Not enough for you? Interface -> Interface Control, Add, Internet Server, Add. Set Pass-code to {my-code}, save and Start. Now you’re getting APRS from the network as well.
5. Want to see it on maps? I wasn’t able to get all the maps going, but things worked when I picked Maps -> Map Chooser and selected only Online/osm_tiled_mapnik.geo and worldhi.map.