juliet

Juliet is an IRC bot that exchanges channel messages over a radio network. The intended use for this bot is to enable communications by amateur radio operators when standard infrastrastructure is not available. While it was designed with D-STAR in mind, any radio capable of exchanging data over a standard serial port should work.

There are several other good programs for messaging using amateur radios, why make one more? Well, mostly to learn how it's done. In addition, using a standard like IRC opens additional possibilities for relayed messages and the use of any standard IRC chat client.

Written by W0JHX. Tested using Icom 92AD with the standard programming cable.

Setup

At the moment, there is no installer for juliet, simply download the repository to an appropriate folder on your computer.

Before using juliet, you will need to install dependencies using poetry:

poetry install

NOTE This will create a virtual environment to avoid conflicts with your local system.

Usage

From the src directory, run the juliet module with your specified config:

poetry run python -m juliet juliet.cfg

• Find or setup an IRC server (ngircd is a good one).
• Connect to your radio's serial interface (or programming cable).
• Create a configuration file (see Configuration below).
• Run the juliet module using local config.
• Connect to the server using any IRC client of your choice.
• Channels where juliet has joined will be relayed over the radio!

Outgoing messages will be rate limited to 1 line per second. This is primarily to help avoid frequency congenstion.

Configuration

This documentation is missing... For now, please use the sample juliet.cfg file to get started.

Server Setup

To use Juliet, you will need a running IRC server. There are many options available, including quite a few that are free. For this project (and in general), I use ngIRCd. If you find another option that works well, feel free to start a discussion in the project page.

Technical Info

It is hard to find information online about some of this stuff, so here is some detail that I've uncovered along the way. Note that this is not intended to be a complete reference for using D-STAR, just some useful information while writing this application.

Connecting to the radio

D-STAR radios typically have a serial port for programming. This port will also accept and relay data from the radio. In most cases, simply opening the serial port is enough to access low-bandwidth data from the radio.

Some radios must be placed in "Auto TX" mode (rather than PTT) in order to send any serial data automatically.

Also, be sure to disable automatic GPS reporting when using a radio with Juliet. This will mangle the data stream such that it cannot be parsed.

D-STAR data format

The D-STAR spec does not define any structure for the data stream, leaving it up to each application. Most radios use a similar format for transmitting GPS data. You may see these messages in the log file, but they are ignored by Juliet.

Juliet message format

WORK IN PROGRESS

>>{version}:{crc16}:{sender}:{timestamp}:{content}:{signature}<<

• version (required) - specify the version of the message structure - see below
• crc16 (required) - the checksum for the message (sender, content, sequence, signature)
• sender (required) - the sender of the message
• timestamp (required) - the timestamp when the message was sent
• content (required) - main content of the message; length of the message is not restricted
• signature (optional) - digital signature used to authenticate the sender (not used currently)

Message Types

The version field denotes both message structure as well as content type.

• 0 - uncompressed text
• 1 - compressed & base-64 encoded text
• 3 - channel text
• 7 - file message - currently unused, but here for completeness

Contributions

If you are interested in contributing to juliet, I would welcome the help! Feel free to send me a message or just fork this repo and submit a pull request.

-73