mwtchahrd

mwtchahrd is an application that works with or without a wrapper script, to send spots to an instance of Spothole running on the FARPN yggdrasil mesh. Or you can send spots to a spothole instance hosted elsewhere.

If you're on the FARPN mesh, you can find it here: http://[300:6f6a:b087:4dda::8]/

To have your node report spots to this fun tool, you need to do several things:

1. Make sure you're on the FARPN yggdrasil mesh (refer to the yggdrasil setup in the tutorial)
2. Install a couple required programs
3. Get a copy of the executable mwtchahrd
4. Get a copy of the wrapper script mwtchahrd_spot.sh and make some tweaks to it
5. Create the systemd service file to run everything
6. enjoy!

The script uses these applications; curl jq awk grep tr tail date timeout. If you followed the FARPN tutorial, you likely only need to install jq

sudo apt install jq

there are a couple versions of this available since a couple different FARPN members have been playing with it. You can follow the steps at these links to create your executable, or you can ask in the FARPN chat for a copy of the newest, since its been very recently getting tinkered with.

https://gitea.farpn.net/n6cta/mwtchahrd

https://gitea.farpn.net/w1cdn/mwtchahrd

If you are installing on a Pi as per the tutorial, you'll want the executable from the generated aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu folder.

Once you have the mwtchahrd executable in hand, put it in your ~/.local/bin/ folder

You'll likely just want to ping one of the FARPN members for a copy of this script. At some point it'll get properly published and we'll put a link to it here.

Once you have mwtchahrd_spot.sh in hand, you'll want to put it in ~/.local/bin.

open it up, so that you can make some edits to it:

nano ~/.local/bin/mwtchahrd_spot.sh 

You'll want to locate the lines below, and tweak them up a bit so they look like these modified versions:

API_BASE="http://[300:6f6a:b087:4dda::8]/api/v1"

DE_CALL="YOURCALLSIGN"

MWTCH_CMD=""/home/YOURUSER/.local/bin/mwtchahrd -i 127.0.0.1 -p 8000 -u"

after you've made those changes, make the script executeable:

chmod +x ~/.local/bin/mwtchahrd_spot.sh

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/mwtchahrd-hf-spot.service

paste from below into the newly created file, and then change USER to your user, callsign, etc.

[Unit]
Description=MWTCHAHRD Spot Forwarder
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=USER
Group=USER
ExecStart=/home/USER/.local/bin/mwtchahrd_spot.sh \
    --api http://[300:6f6a:b087:4dda::8]/api/v1 \
    --call USER-7 \
    --lat 34.103 \
    --lon -117.793 \
    --rigctl "rigctl -m 2 -r 127.0.0.1:4532 f" \
    --mwtch "/home/USER/.local/bin/mwtchahrd -i 127.0.0.1 -p 8000 -u" \
    --dx-loc-overrides "/home/USER/.config/spothole/overrides.txt" \
    --ignore-destinations "MAIL,MBX,CQ,APWW11,BPQWX,DX,FLOCK" \
    --debug
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=3

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and then lastly, enable the service, then start it

sudo systemctl enable mwtchahrd-hf-spot.service

sudo systemctl start mwtchahrd-hf-spot.service

You should now be able to visit the link at the start of this article (if you're on the yggdrasil mesh) and see your spots listed along with the other FARPN generated spots!