GB7CAM Packet Node
What it is
GB7CAM is my packet radio infrastructure project: a licensed LinBPQ node running on a Raspberry Pi, peering with other nodes across the UK packet network. Around the node I’ve built a set of web services — live status, a network topology graph, activity trends, and a searchable bulletin archive — plus a self-hosted WhatsPac chat gateway.
It runs as a production service that other operators connect to and peer with, so it’s treated accordingly: monitored, backed up, and hardened against the failure modes I’ve run into along the way.
GB7CAM has its own dedicated site aimed at operators who want to use the node — connection details, frequencies, status, and documentation. This page is about the project and how it was built; it doesn’t duplicate that information.
Why I built it
Cambridge was a bit of a “packet desert” — plenty of history, not much live activity. I wanted to put a reliable, always-on node back on the air for the area, and to learn the AX.25 / NET/ROM stack properly by running a real service rather than reading about it. It started with a £20 Raspberry Pi and a £10 handheld, which turned out to be enough to get a node on the air.
Current status & goals
- Live and in production — the node, its API, and the direwolf/TNC stack all run as managed services that survive reboots and self-recover from crashes.
- Self-healing bulletins — a recurring crash caused by malformed (bare-CR) bulletins relayed in from peers is now handled by an automatic mail sanitiser, so the node repairs itself instead of going down.
- Network analysis — logging routes and node tables over time to study the real topology of the surrounding packet network.
- Next: a “real-edges” topology graph showing true peer-to-peer adjacency, built from the peer-route snapshots now being collected.
Key links
- GB7CAM website — the dedicated operator-facing site
- Node status
- Network graph
- Activity trends
- Bulletins archive
- WhatsPac gateway (password-gated)
