Guides

One task each, from the start to something working. The getting started pages install the engine and a first profile; these pick up from there.

Set up the station once

Everything else leans on these. Do them in this order the first time.

1. Rig control (CAT) — one program owns the radio's serial port and every other program asks it. The single biggest cause of "it was working yesterday" is two programs fighting over that port.
2. Radio audio — the radio's audio into the computer and back, at the right level. Every digital mode needs it.
3. Time and position — FT8 and its relatives need the clock within a second. With a network that is automatic; without one, a GPS keeps it. On a machine running ntpsec (Parrot's security edition), GPS time on ntpsec is the route, with four modes you can switch.
4. Your callsign in each program — what Hammunition writes for you from hammunition station set, and the settings dialog to visit in each program it does not write.

Then, when you want to switch things off and on:

• The tray's Controls panel — park the GPS or a modem you are not using, start and stop the services behind your position and your clock, and switch the machine's radios, from the tray or from hammunition services, and which of those asks for a password.

Modes

• FT8 and the digital modes — WSJT-X, JS8Call and fldigi, to a first decode and a first contact.
• Packet and Winlink — Direwolf as the modem, Pat for radio email, ARDOP on HF.
• APRS — Direwolf as the TNC, Xastir or YAAC on the map, and the decisions about digipeating and gating that affect other people.
• Mesh and Reticulum — encrypted messaging with no infrastructure: two laptops on one network, then a LoRa RNode, a packet modem or the internet, with NomadNet, rnsh and the Meshtastic clients beside it.

Receiving

• SDR first steps — an inexpensive dongle to broadcast FM, aircraft and 433 MHz sensors in an evening.
• Satellites — passes, Doppler, and pictures from weather satellites.
• Propagation — when a band is open, and why.

In the field

• Load every area ahead, activate where you are — fetch every state and region you might be sent to while you have a network, then one command makes where you are the active area.
• Load every area ahead, activate where you are — fetch every state and region you might be sent to while you have a network, then one command makes where you are the active area.
• Offline navigation — maps, routing and terrain with no network at all.
• Offline reference — Wikipedia, WikiMed, a dictionary and the ICS forms on the laptop, on one local page.
• A LAN mirror for map and reference data — keep a verified copy of the big downloads on a machine on your own network and take them from it.
• Operating at a conference — a portable station in a hotel full of other people's RF.
• Rayhunter — watching for cell-site simulators with EFF's tool.

How these guides are written

• Commands are copied from the tool, not remembered. Where a guide quotes a default, a port or a file name, it was read from the installed program on the date the guide gives.
• What was not measured says so. A step that has not been run on real radio hardware by this project is marked unmeasured; it follows the program's own documentation, which each guide links.
• Placeholders, never a real station. Examples use the callsign N0TST or N0CALL and the grid square FN31pr. Put your own in their place.
• Each program's own manual wins. These pages get you to a working station; the program's documentation, linked from its package page, is where its depth lives.