[Xastir] soundmodem vs agwpacket engine

[Peter Barrett]

I have extensive experience with both soundmodem kernel modules and the
userspace applications since the late 90's.

I'm currently running version 0.15 on a eee compiled myself with puppeee.

I have been unable to compile ax25-tools or ax25-apps (I tried to get some
help on this at linux hams but still waiting.) so i use KISS simple
(/dev/soundmodem0).

Put simply,it doesn't work.

Watching the soundmodem spec-an i see packets but nothing ever gets decoded.

Furthermore, attempting to transmit just produces a single monotonous tone.

I've tried it in alsa mode (plughw:0,0) as well as soundcard mode
(/dev/dsp). no difference.

I'm not surprised, because over the years I have had more frustration with
this program than with any other. The occasional success is tempered with
hours and hours of wasted time.

The documentation is very poor. There is no way of even determining the
version number from the application.

On the other hand, agwpe works every time. It is very easy to set up, and
the documentation is great. there are tooltips to guide you through
everything. It's author deserves a lot of credit.

My conclusion:

Choose soundmodem if you are a masochist and enjoy being frustrated while
everybody else is enjoying the hobby.

Choose agwpe if you actually want to do packet radio.

73deVK6FUN pete

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 5:53 PM, John Ronan <jpronans at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 23/01/11 03:58, Curt, WE7U wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Robert Rogers wrote:
>>
>>  In the past I've ran the agwpacket engine. One of the features I liked
>>> was the ability to run each audio channel as a separate modem. Does
>>> the ax25 soundmodem have the same capability? The how-to didn't
>>> specify if it's works each channel separately or not.
>>>
>>
>> I've seen that question asked before elsewhere, but don't remember any
>> positive replies to it.  I just went hunting and found the ax25 wiki's
>> soundmodem page and it didn't answer the question either.
>>
>> I did find this though:
>>
>>    http://www.ei7ig.org/sat.html
>>
>> Which shows the left channel being used to decode 1200 and 9600 at the
>> same time.  I knew it could do that, but it's nice to see a working config
>> for it on the web.  Examples are always good.
>>
>>  Morning,
>
> Caveat, I only every used it on receive.  And I'm currently experimenting
>  with a KPC9612+ I got off Ebay. My impression was that it was very good
> decoder of signals. This is based on nothing more than me listening to
> signals and watching the output from 'listen'.
>
> Regards
> John
> EI7IG
>
>
>
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