Radios
Packet and APRS are Kenwood D700 radios. We use these radios because they contain TNC devices within the radio. This reduces any interference and simplifies the build out.
VARA is a Yaesu FT-8800 connected through a DRA-36.
Hardware Setup
All services are running on a server providing virtual machines.
Packet Radio and APRS are connected to a the virtual machine via USB mapped into the virtual machine. Since these devices are USB 1.1 serial devices, latency incurred because of the virtual USB mapping is negligible.
VARA is connected via a dedicated PCI device, this is mapped to a windows virtual machine. By mapping PCI devices directly to VMs, removes any latency in passing USB from host to vm which is required for VARA.
Software Setup
LinBPQ is configured to accept multiple ports, for RF side:
- 2 ports using the KISS protocol to interface with the Packet and APRS radios.
- 1 port is configured using the VARA protocol.
By connecting all 3 devices to LinBPQ, this allows us to route any traffic from each RF source to any LinBPQ application.
Notes
While we attempted to use VARA on Linux using multiple different methods, we found this to be unreliable, and decided to use a Windows VM instead.