Hi folks!
I’ve got a bit to report! I’ve been migrating my Linux servers to Debian from RHEL-derived distributions, and the last one to be migrated was the APRS node.
I’ve had W4JDH-1 connected to APRS-IS for a long time: at least since 2011 and possibly earlier. For the longest time it was Xastir in a VNC screen on some Unix-like OS, most likely FreeBSD, then it became a Linux VM, then I tried an OpenBSD VM, and finally it ended up on a PC Engines apu2 embedded board, where it stayed until earlier this week. I’d installed CentOS 8 on the apu2, later migrated it to Rocky Linux 8 and eventually upgraded it to Rocky Linux 9. Its turn came for the migration to Debian, so I backed up aprx.conf, burned the full installer image of Bookworm to a USB stick, dug a null modem cable out, and booted it using the serial console. Unfortunately, even with a keyboard attached, the Debian installer didn’t want to cooperate, so I ended up a little stuck.
I remembered I had a Raspberry Pi 2 that I had set up for a digital voice hotspot, but I’d long since replaced that with an openSPOT3, so it wasn’t being used. Enter this: I pulled the microSD card out, imaged the latest Debian/armhf to it, and booted it with my USB KVM connected to it for console access. I was up and running, at least in part. The Pi 2 does not have onboard Wi-Fi, so I needed to locate a suitable USB Wi-Fi adapter for this. I grabbed one off Amazon that didn’t fully cooperate, so I went digging around in boxes and found one that 100% worked. Excellent, we had connectivity via Wi-Fi.
Once I had Wi-Fi connectivity, and a brand-new USB power supply had arrived, I set the Pi 2 up in place of the apu2, powered everything on, fired up my TH-D74A, and waited for the initial packet burst. It came through, and I saw the station updated on aprs.fi.
W4JDH-1 now consists of the following:
– Aprx on a Raspberry Pi 2 running Debian Linux 12 (Bookworm)
– Kenwood TM-D710A
– Byonics TinyTrak4