Amateur Radio

[Emery Hemingway]

Hello Tyrell,

On Tuesday, January 29, 2019 5:27:18 PM CET, Tyrell Jentink wrote:
> My interest is largely in Amateur Radio; The Linux community has a long
> history of supporting Amateur Radio with protocol stacks (Such as AX.25)
> and both hardware and virtual Terminal Node Controllers in the kernel.
> There are also userland implimentations. Some of those run on Windows...
> some are open source... In other words, lots of code is out there... In
> various levels of loyalty to the Unix philosophy...

I have some experience with amateur radios, but it has been many years
so my knowledge may no longer be relevant. I think using Genode for
something simple like PSK31 or unnumbered AX.25 could be a fun project,
but sending arbitrary IP over AX.25 would be quite complicated. We would
not want to increase the complexity of the current networking stacks
with any alternatives to ethernet, so you would need to provide
everything from AX.25 and up yourself.

> Putting it in the kernel may have never made sense... And the "Genode Way"
> has value in organizing the complexity of the AX.25 networking stack,
> similar to how it separates the organization of the Ethernet stack... How
> much, if any, actually belongs in Genode and/or Sculpt OS is beyond me...
> It all probably deserves to be an installable package, rather than a core
> package...

Yes AX.25 can certainly fit within Genode and Sculpt, but I don't how
portable the existing AX.25 implementations are.

> Fldigi also seems like it could benefit from being broken apart into
> smaller components, with a stronger capability based trust model... Or not,
> I really don't know...

I have used Fldigi before, but there is no FLTK GUI support for Genode
so Fldigi is not immediately portable. However breaking it into smaller
components does sounds interesting, I imagine the transmit and receive
signals would carried by audio sessions and routed to different signal
processors or out to hardware. If the hardware can be controlled by
RS-232 then it shouldn't be too hard to interface with through a
terminal session, but again, I'm not sure how things are done with new
radios.

Best of luck,
Emery