The goal of this article is to give you just enough info to start using QTtermTCP to interact with your node (and others!). For a full guide of QTtermTCP, refer to the author's information.

If you followed the FARPN getting started tutorials, you should be able to find a shortcut to QTTermTCP in the applications menu on your Raspberry Pi or whatever other device you installed your packet station software onto.

You'll want to first navigate to Setup → Hosts → and Choose one of the “New Host” lines

You'll be connecting to your own node locally, not via RF, so in the dialog box that pops up, you'll want to enter the appropriate info. Some of this will come from the user information that you put in the telnet section of your ~/.config/linbpq/bpq32.cfg file, so you may want to open that file for reference.

Host Name: 127.0.1.1<br> Port: 8011 (If you followed our guide. This should match the “FBBPORT” in bpq32.cfg.)<br> User & Password :<br>

You should have a line that looks something like this, in your Telnet section. The first “call” is your username (it doesn't actually have to be your callsign.) That's the value you enter in the “User:” field of QTtermTCP.

the “password” should be your password (you did change that right?!) and that is what you enter in the “Password:” field of QTTermTCP

USER=call,password,CALL,NODE,SYSOP

Session Name: local (you can name this anything you want - local just makes sense)

Click Save when done!

Back at the main screen, click connect, and choose the connection you just created. You should be rewarded with a prompt for you node in the bottom half of the window, and in the top you should start seeing some packet activity scrolling by. The volume of activity in the top will depend on band, mode and conditions, since this is what your station is receiving! Things in red are what your station sends, so if you set up beacons in your config file, or elsewhere, you'll see those periodically get sent.

The first command you'll likely want to enter is:

?

as this will generate a list of applications/commands you can run. If you used our guides, that will likely look similar to this:

?
COOPNT:N3VEM-7} BBS CONNECT BYE INFO NODES PORTS ROUTES USERS MHEARD

play around with the options and see what happens! A nice cheat sheet of commands for you as the SYSOP is available here, thanks to PY2BIL