I made good progress getting Direwolf running on my Pi5 and can now send/receive PACKET just fine using RadioMail on my iPhone.
But, without rig control.
I can make the connection reliably. I found a local PACKET RMS gateway that I can reliably reach. (Ironically, it’s 22 miles away, and the 5 or so closer systems didn’t work for me at all.)
And, I have hamlib/rigctl running fine on the Pi5. I run rigctld and can connect to it on TCP/4532 just fine. (Rig is Icom 7100. flrig and the whole fl* family all function fine.)
What do I need to do to get Direwolf and RadioMail to play nicely together? I’m sure it’s pilot error on my part, but I’m struggling to find what I’m doing wrong.
From your description, I’m assuming that DireWolf is driving PTT fine and what you mean by rig control is for RadioMail to control the frequency?
Currently RadioMail does not handle a separate rig control “channel” for packet connection. This is mostly due to the fact that with most TNC configuration, rig control is not really available (like with the Mobilinkd) and that configuring a rigctl seemed too complicated for most (and yes I realize it’s necessary for VARA HF).
TNC do support extended hardware command, and since the TNC is connected to the radio and aware of its specificity, it makes more sense for the TNC to take care of this. This is what we’ve done with the PicoAPRS radio for example, and also what I’ve designed with B.B. Link when in use with TH-D74/75 radios.
Ideally, someone would add support for those extended hardware command for Direwolf to be able to QSY. I’ve started documenting what those commands are:
https://github.com/islandmagic/kiss-tnc-hw-cmd
Also, Georges, I did more testing with VARA (both) and Varanny. RadioMail finds the server just fine. But, I get that connection refused exception before VARA has finished loading.
Loading VARA on a Pi5 is itself complex. VARA needs WINE, of course (and sadly). But, the Pi5 is ARM64, so Box86 and Box64 are also required. It runs — I’ve tested it on the Pi5 using Winlink Express — but the launch takes several seconds. Once it’s up, it runs pretty well. From the outside looking in, this seems to be a timing issue on the server side. Any suggestions?
Yes it’s more complicated to run it on a Pi, and why I prefer the Beelink T4 because it’s x86. Looks like RadioMail is either timing out or getting a connection refused because VARA is not binding to the port yet (seems the most likely).
Can you time how long it takes for VARA to start in your configuration?
Alternatively, you can try to increase this value:
https://github.com/islandmagic/varanny/blob/master/varanny.go#L388
in varanny and see if that fixes it.
I probably need to implement a more sophisticated connection retry algorithm in RadioMail proper. So far it had assumed that VARA was up and running before trying to connect, but since it’s no longer true, it’s probably failing to connect and bails too soon.