Pat is a cross platform Winlink client with basic messaging capabilities.
It is the primary sandbox/prototype application for the wl2k-go project, and provides both a command line interface and a responsive (mobile-friendly) web interface.
It is mainly developed for Linux, but is also known to run on OS X, Windows and Android.
- Message composer/reader (basic mailbox functionality).
- Auto-shrink image attachments.
- Post position reports with location from local GPS, browser location or manual entry.
- Rig control (using hamlib).
- CRON-like syntax for execution of scheduled commands (e.g. QSY or connect).
- Built in http-server with web interface (mobile friendly).
- Git style command line interface.
- Listen for P2P connections using multiple modes concurrently.
- AX.25, telnet, PACTOR and ARDOP support.
- Experimental gzip message compression (See "Gzip experiment" below).
martinhpedersen@duo:~$ pat interactive
> listen winmor,telnet-p2p,ax25
2015/02/03 10:33:10 Listening for incoming traffic (winmor,telnet-p2p,ax25)...
> connect winmor:///LA3F
2015/02/03 10:34:28 Connecting to winmor:LA3F...
2015/02/03 10:34:33 Connected to WINMOR:LA3F
RMS Trimode 1.3.3.0 Follo.SE Oslo. Pactor & Winmor Hybrid Gateway
LA5NTA has 117 minutes remaining with LA3F
[WL2K-2.8.4.8-B2FWIHJM$]
Wien CMS via LA3F >
>FF
FC EM FOYNU8AKXX59 260 221 0
F> 68
1 proposal(s) received
Accepting FOYNU8AKXX59
Receiving [//WL2K test til linux] [offset 0]
>FF
FQ
Waiting for remote node to close the connection...
> _
Gzip message compression has been added as an experimental B2F extension. The extension is implemented as a backwards compatible alternative to the ancient LZHUF compression.
This experiment is enabled by default and sessions between two Pat nodes (or other software supporting this B2F extension) will use gzip compression when transferring messages.
For more information, see https://github.com/la5nta/wl2k-go#gzip-experiment.
This version of Pat supports a native AX.25 interface. This is obviously experimental and may have issues, but it should ease the use of Pat and allow it to do AX.25 on non-Linux hosts.
This uses the AX.25 layer of the gensio library, see https://github.com/cminyard/gensio
You need to build this to get it working, and unfortunately, it's not an easy process. On all platforms, to build this, you must first check out a version of swig that has some bug fixes in the Go part. These are in mainline for swig, but not yet released.
You will need git, gcc, g++, and go, flex, bison, and libpcre2-dev installed, and perhaps a few other things. You must also make sure "go" is in your current PATH. You can get it at https://go.dev/. Then do:
git clone https://github.com/swig/swig
cd swig
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix $HOME/tmpswig
make
make install
export PATH=$HOME/tmpswig/bin:$PATH
There may be more things to install than I have said, the configure script should tell you if it needs something else, but that's broken for bison.
Now check out Pat and build it:
cd ..
git clone -b gensio-work https://github.com/cminyard/wl2k-go
git clone -b gensio-work https://github.com/cminyard/pat
cd pat
./make.bash libax25 #Linux only
./make.bash gensio
./make.bash
You should now have a pat executable in the current directory.
You have to add a configuration for ax25+gensio. It won't have it if you already have a configuration installed. The default one is:
"gensio": {
"gensio": "kiss,keepopen(discard-badwrites=yes),tcp,localhost,8001",
},
The "gensio" string tells Pat how to connect to the TNC. If you are running direwolf on the local system, the default is correct. Otherwise replace "localhost" with the proper host and the "8001" with the port number you need. If you need to specify kiss parameters, you would add (parm=a,parm=b) after kiss in the gensio string, like "kiss(txdelay=100),tcp,...". See the gensio.5 man page for details on this. Added parameters to the ax25 gensio can be added by doing "(parm=x)" before kiss, no comma.
If you have a Kenwood D710 and want to use the built-in TNC through a serial port, you can use the following gensio line:
"gensio": "kiss(d710),serialdev,/dev/ttyUSB1,9600n81,local,rtscts",
If you want to use 9600 baud instead of 1200 baud, use "d710-9600" instead of "d710". Note that once you put the D710 in KISS mode, you have to reset the TNC to get it out of KISS mode. Turning the radio off and does this; there may be another way but I don't know how.
If you have another serial TNC, you would use something like the following for the gensio string:
(crc=yes)kiss,serialdev,/dev/ttyS0,9600n81,local
with obvious substitutions where you need them. If you have hardware flow control, add ",rtscts" on to the end of this. This is untested, except on the D710. The need for the "(crc=yes)" part depends on if the TNC does the CRC itself. The CRC code in the AX25 stack is not well tested, but I hacked some things in direwolf so it would send the CRC on and it appeared to work.
If you need some special startup string to talk to your TNC, you can send that with changing "kiss" to:
kiss(setupstr='<string>')
setup string is a normal "C" string, you can use \n for newline, \r for carraige return, \xnn for the hex value nn, etc. Any \ needs to be doubled. If you specify a setupstr, a 1 second wait is done for the string to complete. If you need more, you can add "setup-delay=n" where "n" is in milliseconds.
You can pass parameters to the ax25 gensio by putting:
(parm=asdf,parm=asdf)
at the beginning of the gensio string (like the CRC in the previous example). By default crc is disabled as direwolf/soundmodem does it for you, but it might be required for a serial TNC.
To see the man page telling about gensio strings, do the following from the pat directory after building:
nroff -man .build/gensio-2.4.0-rc4/man/gensio.5 | less -r
To use this, you basically just put ax25+gensio where you would normally use ax25, except there's none of the linux setup. Or you can just use ax25 and add:
"engine": "gensio"
to the ax25 config entry. Once you do "pat configure" you are ready to go. For instance, I use:
pat connect ax25+gensio:///n5cor-10
The gensio library is pretty flexible, you can use UDP as well. That's too big a discussion for here, see the gensio man page and gensio README for details.
Note that I have compiled and tried this under Windows using mingw64 (you still have to compile swig and such, you have to compile gensio yourself, and you have to build with go in a native Windows environment). It works, but it's fairly complicated. If you know what you are doing it's not too hard. If you don't know what you are doing the learning curve is pretty steep.
So to compile under Windows, you basically follow the steps above in the mingw64 environment, except you don't do the "./make.bash libax25" step since that's for Linux only. You will end up with a binary that has some DLL dependencies to mingw64 stuff, but that is unavoidable, as far as I can tell.
Some gateway connections require you to interact with the gateway before it connects you to the remote system. ax25+gensio supports this by calling an external program and connecting it's stdin/stdout to ax25. So anything written to stdout by the external program will be sent out ax25, and anything received on ax25 will be sent to the external program's stdin. This way you can use something like "expect" (with expect_user and send_user) to do the interaction you need. Or you can use any other programming language you would like. Just be careful that you flush output when writing, or things may not be sent.
To use scripting, add script= to the url as a standard url item. So, for instance, I used:
pat connect 'ax25+gensio:///n5cor-10?parms=extended=0&script=./testscr'
where "testscr" is the program in the current directory. Once the program exits, the connection process will continue normally.
If connecting via the web gui, you can add &script= at the end of the parms field and it should work.
Copyright (c) 2020 Martin Hebnes Pedersen LA5NTA
- DL1THM - Torsten Harenberg
- HB9GPA - Matthias Renner
- K0RET - Ryan Turner
- K0SWE - Chris Keller
- KD8DRX - Will Davidson
- KE8HMG - Andrew Huebner
- KI7RMJ - Rainer Grosskopf
- LA3QMA - Kai Günter Brandt
- LA4TTA - Erlend Grimseid
- LA5NTA - Martin Hebnes Pedersen
- N2YGK - Alan Crosswell
- VE7GNU - Doug Collinge
- W6IPA - JC Martin
- WY2K - Benjamin Seidenberg
The JNOS developers for the properly maintained lzhuf implementation, as well as the original author Haruyasu Yoshizaki.
The paclink-unix team (Nicholas S. Castellano N2QZ and others) - reference implementation
Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc. - The Winlink 2000 project
F6FBB Jean-Paul ROUBELAT - the FBB forwarding protocol
Pat/wl2k-go is not affiliated with The Winlink Development Team nor the Winlink 2000 project [http://winlink.org].