This is the home of Frank, VE1FIS (frank at ve1fis dot net). I live at FN84dp, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

My current interest is building gadgets for use with APRS and packet radio. WiFi routers that run Linux distributions such as OpenWRT have a lot of potential for packet radio because they can be used to build inexpensive "network-enabled TNCs". These can be hooked up to radios and placed somewhere out of the way, and packet radio software such as AGWTracker, UI-View or Xastir can be run on laptops that don't need to be tethered to a TNC and radio.

With this in mind, I started taking routers apart and putting them back together with various other bits. My first "frankenrouter" was built out of a Linksys WRT54G router and an OpenTracker+ RT running OpenWRT. My second frankenrouter is made out of an ASUS WL-520gU with a USB audio dongle, using soundmodem. I'm convinced that soundmodem is the way to go because it removes the need for hardware hacking.

OpenWRT AGWPE Engine

UPDATE October 7 2009: A Linux-based server program called ldsped which implements the AGWPE TCP/IP protocol is being developed by ON7LDS. It enables packet client software such as AGWTracker, UI-View and Xastir (which have support for AGWPE) to do packet radio remotely over TCP/IP. I am currently testing it at home: I am using my XP laptop running AGWTracker upstairs while sitting on the couch, and ldsped is running on frankenrouter-2 downstairs where the radio is. No problems so far, and it works great! It has not been formerly released in source code yet, but I have a binary available for OpenWRT. If you are interested in trying it out, please email me.