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 covering 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, with 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”, with plenty of history but 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 and 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)
