[aprssig] APRS for One-Laptop-Per-Child

[J. Lance Cotton]

on 11/13/2007 12:42 PM Curt, WE7U said the following:
> One of the responses said it was "AC97" hardware.  That's one of the
> low-end soundcard hardware implementations, right?  I don't know if
> it's sufficient for the "soundmodem software.  Perhaps someone could
> respond directly to that?  A Google search on
> 
>     soundmodem ac97
> 
> Shows that people have asked about AC97/soundmodem before.
> 
> As far as soundmodem software processor-dependence, at least one
> person compiled it for Solaris and had it working, configured as a
> serial KISS TNC instead of an AX.25 kernel networking port.  I
> _think_ that was on a Sparc processor but can't say for sure.

I've used soundmodem successfully on Linux/i386 with an AC97 soundcard. It 
actually works better than the more expensive SB Live! 5.1 cards I have 
because the Live! cards didn't have hardware support for the exact sampling 
rate that soundmodem used -- the OSS driver ended up picking the closest 
supported and resampling (rather than returning an error), which really 
screwed things up re: decoding ability.

The ALSA sound system now in use on recent Linux systems probably works 
better, but I haven't tried it out yet.

Soundmodem compiles sans-AX.25 kernel support just as you said, creating a 
virtual com port pretending to be KISS. MacOS X users can use it this way, 
too, I believe.

-- 
J. Lance Cotton, KJ5O
joe at lightningflash.net
http://kj5o.lightningflash.net
Three Step Plan: 1. Take over the world. 2. Get a lot of cookies. 3. Eat the 
cookies.