cats-igate

Reference CATS/FELINET I-gate/digipeater for the Raspberry Pi. Requires an I-Gate board: https://gitlab.scd31.com/cats/pi-hardware

Building

To build the software, you will need to install Rustup. You'll also need to install some dependencies:

sudo apt install git protobuf-compiler

After these are installed, restart your terminal, or open a new one. Then run these commands:

git clone https://gitlab.scd31.com/cats/igate
cd igate
git pull
cargo install cargo-deb
cargo deb

The resulting deb package will placed in target/debian/cats-igate_VERSION.deb

Installing

Once built, the package can be installed with sudo dpkg -i target/debian/cats-igate_VERSION.deb, replacing VERSION with whatever version and architecture was built.

Configuring

First of all, the SPI bus must be enabled on the Pi. It's disabled by default and is required to communicate with the hardware. This can be enabled in the raspi-config utility under "Interface Options". After enabling, restart the Pi.

The configuration for the I-gate lives in /etc/cats_igate/config.toml. Make sure to update this before using the utility - most importantly, the callsign must be configured.

Usage

For debugging, a single command line option exists. Running cats-igate -x <freq> in a terminal will send out constant test packets (properly identified, of course) which is useful for diagnostics. Please don't run this on the main CATS frequency or it will utilize 100% of the channel! Also, make sure whichever frequency you choose is unused.

The I-gate ships with a service file, which allows it to run autonomously. To start the service, run sudo systemctl start cats-igate. To have the service automatically start at bootup, run sudo systemctl enable cats-igate.