amateur-radio

New project: a replacement head unit for the Yaesu FT-857(D)

So, for a long while now I’ve been a user of a Yaesu FT-857D. I bought it back in 2011 as shop-soiled stock (someone bought it before me thinking they could make it work on 27MHz!) and have used it on the bicycle pretty much ever since.

The FT-857D is a great rig. Capable of all common amateur bands from 160m through to 70cm, 100W on MF/HF/6m, 50W on 2m, 20W on 70cm, and able to work AM/FM/SSB/CW, in a nice small package. It’s ideal for the bike in that regard. The only thing I could wish for is an actually waterproof head unit, but the stock one has been good, until now.

Last time I rode the bike I had no issues with the head unit display, things were stable and working just fine. That was some months back. Today fired it up to check the battery voltage: it seems I’ve got the dreadded zebra stripe issue. The bike has been in the garage for the past few months, so under cover, not in the sun… anecdotal evidence is that this problem is caused by vibration/heat in vehicle installations, but some reports suggest this can happen for indoor fixed installations too.

The problem

Either way, the zebra has made its home in my radio’s head unit and the display is now pretty much unreadable. Reports suggest I can send it back to Yaesu, pay them $200 (I presume that’s USD, and does not include shipping), and they will replace the defective LCD. However… given they discontinued making these things a few years back, I think I’ve missed the boat on that one!

Time for replacement?

Buying a new replacement isn’t viable right now — Yaesu don’t make anything equivalent: the FT-991A is too big (same size as the FT-897D), the FT-891 doesn’t do 2m/70cm, the FT-818ND is only QRP. Icom’s IC-7100 is the nearest competitor, not out of the question, except it’s a pricey unit for something that will be out in the weather.

Also, a lot of these options are out-of-stock with a big lead time.

Most of the Chinese units only do FM, and are at best quad-banders. Not that I’m interested in buying one: I hear they’re not the longest-lived of transceivers and right now I wish to avoid buying from China anyway.

Kenwood are basically out of the market here in Australia, and they never had an offering like the Icom or Yaesu units; their TS-480SAT was the closest, but does not cover 2m/70cm. The TS-2000 is a monster.

Alinco don’t have anything in a mobile format that competes either. The DX-SR9T does not cover 2m/70cm and is rather big; none of their 2m/70cm sets do HF or SSB.

Keeping the old faithful going

The radio itself works fine. It looks like the wreck of the Hesperus… with paintwork rubbed off the body, screws missing, a DIY fix on the antenna ports, and miscellaneous fixes to other bits. It still works though.

DIY Repair

This could be tricky as I’m not entirely sure what the issue is. It could be just a need for re-flowing everything, or there’s talk of parts needing replacement. The information I have is pretty murky and I could wind up making my partially-working head unit completely non-working.

Replacement used head unit

If someone had a working head unit that they were willing to part with, that might be an option. That said, the used unit could have the same problems my existing unit has, so no guarantee it’ll fix the problem.

CAT port auxiliary display

There are projects that link to the CAT port and present a UI on a separate screen. I was planning on putting a Raspberry Pi 4 there for SDR work, so that’s an option.

Homebrew head unit

Another option is to make a new front head unit. It turns out this has been partially reverse-engineered, so might be a worthy avenue to consider. That would give me a head unit that I can purpose-build for the bike: an attractive option. The hardware interface is 5V TTL UART with a 62kbps baud rate and 8-bits, no parity, two stop bits.

I have a big LCD (128×64) that has been kicking around for a while as well as some TFT resistive touchscreen displays with STM32F103VEs.

The Raspberry Pi 4 scraping the data and presenting it via a remote UI is also an option, in fact may be the direction I wind up going simply because Python on an ARM CPU is much easier to use prototyping something than doing C on a MCU whilst I bed down the finer details of the protocol.

The attraction of this is that I can use what I have on-hand now. Possibly use my tablet as the front-end in the short term. Not good in the rain, but can’t argue with the price!

I’ll go ponder this some more… one thing I am short of though is time to work on this stuff. This week-end is through, and the next one I’ll already be tied up on the Saturday, so I guess I’ll have to squeeze something in.

2022/05/15 by Amateur Radio Bicycle Mobile Public Syndication 0

Thinking about SDR on the bike

So, for close to a decade now, I’ve had a bicycle-mobile station. Originally just restricted to 2m/70cm FM, it expanded to 2m SSB with the FT-290RII, then later all-band using a FT-857D.

It’s remained largely unchanged all this time. The station is able to receive MW/SW stations as well, and with some limitations, FM broadcast as well. My recent radio purchases will expand this a bit, freeing up the FT-857D’s general-coverage receiver to just focus on amateur bands. It’s been a long-term project though to move to SDR for reception.

What I have now

Already acquired is a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB model) and a NWDR DRAWS interface board. I actually started out with a Raspberry Pi 3 + DRAWS and was waiting for the case for it to fit into. At that stage was the idea that the FT-897D would do much as it does now, no SDR involved, and I’d put a small hand-held with its own antenna as an APRS rig being driven by the second port on the DRAWS.

Since then; I bought the HackRF One for work (I needed something that could give me a view of the 2.4GHz ISM band for development of the WideSky Hub), the SDR bug firmly bit. Initially it was just DAB+ reception, I decided to get a RTL-SDR to do that so my radio listening wouldn’t be interrupted when a colleague needed to borrow the HackRF. That RTL-SDR saw some use receiving UHF CB traffic at horse endurance ride events at Imbil — I stated to consider whether maybe this might be a better option as a receiver for more than just commercial radio broadcasts.

Hence I purchased the Pi4: I figured that’d have enough CPU grunt that it’d still be able to decode a reasonable amount even if the CPU throttled itself for thermal management purposes. A pair of SDR interfaces would allow me to monitor a couple of bands simultaneously, such as 2m and 70cm together, or 2m/70cm and one of the HF bands.

Even the RTL-SDR v3 dongles are wide enough to watch the entire 2m band. With CAT control of the FT-857D, it’d be possible for the Pi4 to switch the FT-857D to the same frequency and possibly manage some antenna switching relays as well.

A rough design

This morning I came up with this:

A rough design of the SDR set-up

A critical design feature is that this must have a “pass-through” option so that in the event the computer crashes/fails, I can bypass all the fancy stuff and still use the FT-857D safely as I do now without all the fancy SDR stuff.

So while in SDR mode: the station pushbuttons on the handlebar go to a small sequencing MCU that can report events to the Pi4, on transmit the Pi4 can then instruct that MCU to connect the antennas into bypass mode, short-out the SDR inputs to protect them, then engage the PTT on the FT-857D, and transmit audio can either be delivered direct via the analogue inputs as they are now, or over USB/WiFi/Bluetooth through the MiniDIN6 DATA port.

The thinking is to have two SDRs, one of which is “agile” between HF/6m and 2m/70cm modes.

The front-end will be handled via the tablet: a Samsung Galaxy Active3 which can connect over WiFi or USB CDC-Ethernet.

I’ve shown gain-blocks between the antennas and the receivers, this is largely for impedance matching as well as to account for the losses involved in antenna sharing. Not sure what these will technically look like.

The two on the HF side should be ideally 0-60MHz devices. If I use the AirSpy HF+ as pictured, the VHF/UHF LNA connected to it only has to concentrate on the VHF band below 260MHz (really 144-148MHz, but let’s widen that to 87-230MHz for FM broadcast, air-band and DAB+) since that’s where the AirSpy stops.

The other, for now I’m looking at a RTL-SDR since I have one spare, but that could be any VHF/UHF capable SDR including the AirSpy Mini — the LNA on it, as well as the one feeding the FT-857D in receive mode will both need to handle 144-450MHz at a minimum.

It may be these frequency bands are “too wide” for a single device, and so I need to consider band-pass filters + separate band-specific LNAs and additional switching circuitry.

SDR selection

There are a couple of options I’ve considered:

The thing I don’t like about the SDRPlay Duo is the non-free nature of its libraries which seem to be only available for i386 or AMD64. Otherwise on paper it looks like a nice option.

KerberosSDR/KrakenSDR seems like overkill. It’s basically four (or five) RTL-SDRs sharing a common oscillator which is essential for direction-finding, but let’s face it, I’ll never have enough antennas to make such an application feasible on the bicycle. It looks like an echidna now!

BladeRF looks nice, but is pricey and stops short of the HF band so would need an up-converter like the RTL-SDR — not a show-stopper. That said, it’s dual-channel and can transmit as well as receive, so cross-band repeater would be doable.

I should try this with the HackRF One some day, see if I can combine a conventional transceiver + RPi + DRAWS/UDRC + HackRF One to make a cross-band repeater.

The Airspy HF+ is available domestically, and isn’t too badly priced. It doesn’t transmit like the HackRF does, but then again I could stuff one of my Wouxun KG-UVD1Ps in there wired up to the second DRAWS port if I wanted a traditional cross-band set-up.

Next steps

It would seem the LNA / antenna sharing side of things needs consideration next. RF relays will need to be procured that can handle seeing 100W of RF. Where I’ve drawn a single switch, that’ll likely be multiple in reality — when the transmitter is connected to the antenna, the receivers should all be shorted to ground so they don’t get blown up by stray RF.

Maybe the LNAs feeding the FT-857D will need to be connected to a dummy-load to protect them, not sure. Perhaps LNAs aren’t strictly necessary, and I can “cheat” by just connecting receivers in parallel, but I’m not comfortable with this idea right now. So this is the area of research I’m focusing on right now.

2022/02/20 by Amateur Radio Bicycle Mobile Emergency Communications Public Syndication WICEN 0

6LoWHAM: Thoughts on how to distribute context and applications

So, one evening I was having difficulty sleeping, so like some people count sheep, turned to a different problem…6LoWPAN relies on all nodes sharing a common “context”. This is used as a short-hand to “compress” the rather lengthy IPv6 addresses for allowing two nodes to communicate with one another by substituting particular IPv6 address subnets with a “context number” which can be represented in 4 bits.

Fundamentally, this identifier is a stand-in for the subnet address. This was a sticking-point with earlier thoughts on 6LoWHAM: how do we agree on what the context should be? My thought was, each network should be assigned a 3-bit network ID. Why 3-bit? Well, this means we can reserve some context IDs for other uses. We use SCI/DCI values 0-7 and leave 8-15 reserved; I’ll think of a use for the other half of the contexts.

The node “group” also share a SSID; the “group” SSID. This is a SSID that receives all multicast traffic for the nodes on the immediate network. This might be just a generic MCAST-n SSID, where n is the network ID; or it could be a call-sign for a local network coordinator, e.g. I might decide my network will use VK4MSL-0 for my group SSID (network 0). Probably nodes that are listening on a custom SSID should still listen for MCAST-n traffic, in case a node is attempting to join without knowing the group SSID.

AX.25 allows for 16 SSIDs per call-sign, so what about the other 8? Well, if we have a convention that we reserve SSIDs 0-7 for groups; that leaves 8-15 for stations. This can be adjusted for local requirements where needed, and would not be enforced by the protocol.

Joining a network

How does a new joining node “discover” this network? Firstly, the first node in an area is responsible for “forming” the network — a node which “forms” a network must be manually programmed with the local subnet, group SSID and other details. Ensuring all nodes with “formation” capability for a given network is beyond the scope of 6LoWHAM.

When a node joins; at first it only knows how to talk to immediate nodes. It can use MCAST-n to talk to immediate neighbours using the fe80::/64 subnet. Anyone in earshot can potentially reply. Nodes simply need to be listening for traffic on a reserved UDP port (maybe 61631; there’s an optimisation in 6LoWPAN for 61616-61631). The joining node can ask for the network context, maybe authenticate itself if needed (using asymmetric cryptography – digital signatures, no encryption).

The other nodes presumably already know the answer, but for all nodes to reply simultaneously, would lead to a pile-up. Nodes should wait a randomised delay, and if nothing is heard in that period, they then transmit what they know of the context for the given network ID.

The context information sent back should include:

  • Group SSID
  • Subnet prefix
  • (Optional) Authentication data:
    • Public key of the forming network (joining node will need to maintain its own “trust” database)
    • Hash of all earlier data items
    • Digital signature signed with included public key

Once a node knows the context for its chosen network, it is officially “joined”.

Routing to non-local endpoints

So, a node may wish to send a message to another node that’s not directly reachable. This is, after-all, the whole point of using a routing protocol atop AX.25. If we knew a route, we could encode it in the digipeater path, and use conventional AX.25 source routing. Nodes that know a reliable route are encouraged to do exactly that. But what if you don’t know your way around?

APRS uses WIDEN-n to solve this problem: it’s a dumb broadcast, but it achieves this aim beautifully. n just stands for the number of hops, and it gets decremented with each hop. Each digipeater inserts itself into the path as it sends the frame on. APRS specs normally call for everyone to broadcast all at once, pile-up be damned. FM capture effect might help here, but I’m not sure its a good policy. Simple, but in our case, we can do a little better.

We only need to broadcast far enough to reach a node that knows a route. We’ll use ROUTE-n to stand for a digipeater that is no more than n hops away from the station listed in the AX.25 destination field. n must be greater than 0 for a message to be relayed. AX.25 2.0 limits the number of digipeaters to 8 (and 2.2 to 2!), so naturally n cannot be greater than 8.

So we’ll have a two-tier approach.

Routing from a node that knows a viable route

If a node that receives a ROUTE-n destination message, knows it has a good route that is n or less hops away from the target; it picks a randomised delay (maybe 0-5 seconds range), and if no reply is heard from another node; it relays the message: the ROUTE-n is replaced by its own SSID, followed by the required digipeater path to reach the target node.

Routing from a node that does not know a viable route

In the case where a node receives this same ROUTE-n destination message, does not know a route, and hasn’t heard anyone else relay that same message; it should pick a randomised delay (5-10 second range), and if it hasn’t heard the message relayed via a specific path in that time, should do one of the following:

If n is greater than 1:

Substitute ROUTE-n in the digipeater path with its own SSID followed by ROUTE-(n-1) then transmit the message.

If n is 1 (or 0):

Substitute ROUTE-n with its own SSID (do not append ROUTE-0) then transmit the message.

Routing multicast traffic

Discovering multicast listeners

I’ll have to research MLD (RFC-3810 / RFC-4604), but that seems the sensible way forward from here.

Relaying multicast traffic

If a node knows of downstream nodes that ordinarily rely on it to contact the sender of a multicast message, and it knows the downstream nodes are subscribers to the destination multicast group, it should wait a randomised period, and forward the message on (appending its SSID in the digipeater path) to the downstream nodes.

Application thoughts

I think I have done some thoughts on what the applications for this system may be, but the other day I was looking around for “prior art” regarding one-to-many file transfer applications.

One such system that could be employed is UFTP. Yes, it mentions encryption, but that is an optional feature (and could be useful in emcomm situations). That would enable SSTV-style file sharing to all participants within the mesh network. Its ability to be proxied also lends itself to bridging to other networks like AMPRnet, D-Star packet, DMR and other systems.

2021/09/16 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Projects Public Syndication Thinktank 0

6LoWHAM: Route discovery thoughts

Thinking about the routing problem a little more… if I wanted to do a purely “native” routing scheme not involving Net/ROM routing update broadcasts, one has to wonder what such a system would look like.

Net/ROM L3 is really just intended to “bootstrap” things… there’s the prospect of using Net/ROM L4 for tunnelling TCP traffic, but really it’s the L3 part that interests me as a way of hopping between fragments of the mesh that may be linkable via a non-6LoWHAM capable digipeater.

Net/ROM’s periodic broadcasts are inefficient, divulging a node’s entire routing table is not an ideal situation.  So what’s the alternative?  IPv6 nodes already send a “neighbour discovery” packet when they don’t know the MAC address of a neighbour, this is a trigger for a “neighbour advertisement” response.

I’m thinking 6LoWHAM will send NAs periodically anyway.  ACMA rules require identifying every 10 minutes.  Since the NA will include the call-sign of the station (in bit-shifted ASCII), doing that every 10 minutes takes care of the ACMA requirement.  An IPv6 NA message is not a big payload.

Given this will be sent to the ff02::1 multicast group, all nodes able to hear the beaconing station will receive it.  Unlike a IEEE 802.11 or 802.3 network though, not all nodes on the mesh will hear it.

The same is true of ND messages.  If the neighbour is in ear-shot and able to respond, it likely will, but that isn’t a guarantee.  Something in the link-local scope will likely be the answer, probably a daemon listening on a UDP port and sending to the ff02::1 group.

Unicast routing

When a station wishes to make contact with a station that’s not an immediate neighbour, I’m thinking of a broadcast similar to how APRS does things.  APRS uses special call-signs WIDEn-m, where the hop-limit is encoded in those messages.

A UDP message would be constructed asking “Who can reach X within N hops?” and sent to ff02::1 to some “well-known” port.

The first second is reserved for responses from nodes that know a route, either through Net/ROM, or maybe they’ve been in contact with that station before.  They respond something along the lines of “X via A,B,C, quality Q”, where A, B, C are digipeaters and Q is some link quality value.

Not sure how I’ll derive Q just yet.  Possibly based on packet loss… we’ll think of something.

If no responses are heard, the routers that heard the message re-broadcast it and listen for replies.  In the re-broadcast, each router appends its 48-bit 6LoWHAM address and a link quality to the message payload.  The hop limit would also get decremented.  That way, it can break cycles, and it gives a direct unicast path for the distant node to respond.

The same algorithm applies: wait a second for immediate responses, then any routers downstream append their addresses/link quality values, decrement the hop limit, and re-broadcast.

Again, any node that overhears the message (including the target node), may respond.  It does so via a direct unicast, sent using conventional AX.25 digipeating.  Any router en route that relays the message may also cache the result.  The “mesh” gets to learn of where everyone is as-required rather than by default with Net/ROM.

If the hop limit reaches zero, no further re-broadcasts are made, the message stops there.

When the source node hears the replies, each reply resets a 100msec timer.  100msec after the last reply, it chooses three “best” routes, and sends a ICMPv6 ND message via each one to the target station.  The station replies to all three back via those routes with an ICMPv6 NA.  If a message is lost via one of those routes, that route is demoted in quality.

Once replies have arrived back at the source, it picks the best route based on the updated quality information, and begins communications via that route.

Multicast routing

This, is more tricky.  I think the link-local should mean what it means on Thread… that is ff02::/16 just gets processed by immediate neighbours that are in direct RF range.

Realm-local (RFC-7346), ff03::/16 should be used for stuff that’s mesh-wide.  Those messages may be repeated by routers provided those routers have at least one subscriber for the given multicast group/port listening.

Multicast Listener Discovery looks to be the tool for that, although it could do with some 6LoWPAN-style optimisation.

I’m thinking the first time a router hears a datagram destined for a particular group, it should send a query out asking “who is listening” to the said group.

Following that first message, it should be up to the downstream node to inform the local routers that it intends to receive messages from a given group.  This should be periodic, maybe hourly, so that routers are not re-broadcasting messages for a node that has gone off-air.

Routers that have no listeners for a group, do not rebroadcast that group’s traffic.  Similarly, if the hop limit has been exhausted, the messages do not get rebroadcast.

2018/11/21 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Projects Public Syndication WICEN 0

6LoWHAM: A draft protocol specification

Today, I decided to get cuddly with the relevant RFCs and see if I could adapt them into something that would work for AX.25. The following roughly describes how one might stuff IPv6 datagrams into AX.25.

Much of this is heavily influenced by RFC-4944 and RFC-6282, the latter of which looks to be the heart-and-soul of Thread.

Stateless Automatic Addressing

We have a mechanism by which an AX.25 call+SSID can be losslessly mapped to a 48-bit MAC address. This is built on Radix-50 and can work as a stand-in for the EUI-48. The pseudo EUI-48 procedure mentioned in section 6 of the RFC-4944 standard is not required.

An EUI-64 is generated from an EUI-48 by chopping the EUI-48 in half and inserting the bytes ff:fe in the middle. So the EUI-48:

00:11:22:33:44:55

becomes the following EUI-64:

00:11:22:ff:fe:33:44:55

SLAAC therefore will work the same way it does for Ethernet.

Frame format

1. AX.25 UI Frame header

Size: (17 + (D*7) bytes, where D is the number of digipeaters being used

  • PID = 1100 0101 (tentative) IPv6
  • Control = 0000 0011
    • Frame type: UI, P/F = 0 (final)
  • Must contain source and destination AX.25 callsigns, may contain up to 8 digipeater AX.25 callsigns.

For a direct station-to-station contact:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│       AX.25 Flag (0x7e)       │ Destination AX.25 Call+SSID   │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Source AX.5 Call+SSID                                         │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┬───────────────────────────────┤
│                               │          AX.25 PID            │
├───────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┤
╎             AX.25 UI frame payload starts here                ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘

or for contact via a few digipeaters:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│       AX.25 Flag (0x7e)       │ Destination AX.25 Call+SSID   │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Source AX.5 Call+SSID                                         │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┬───────────────────────────────┤
│                               │    Digipeater 1 Call+SSID     │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Digipeater 2 Call+SSID                                        │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┬───────────────────────────────┤
│                               │          AX.25 PID            │
├───────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┤
╎             AX.25 UI frame payload starts here                ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘

2. Mesh Addressing Header

To be used when two stations are not able to directly communicate, or when multicasting.

In this scenario, the AX.25 frame source and destination indicate the addresses of the directly-communicating nodes (e.g. source and digipeater, intermediate digipeaters, or digipeater and destination), and the fields given here will be the addresses of the source and destination AX.25 stations.

e.g. sending from VK4MSL-0 to VK4MDL-9 via
VK4RZB-0 and VK4RZA-0:

  1. First transmission:
    • AX.25 Src: VK4MSL-0
    • AX.25 Dst: VK4RZB-0
    • Mesh Src: VK4MSL-0
    • Mesh Dst: VK4MDL-9
    • Hops: 7
  2. Intermediate hop:
    • AX.25 Src: VK4RZB-0
    • AX.25 Dst: VK4RZA-0
    • Mesh Src: VK4MSL-0
    • Mesh Dst: VK4MDL-9
    • Hops: 6
  3. Final delivery:
    • AX.25 Src: VK4RZA-0
    • AX.25 Dst: VK4MDL-9
    • Mesh Src: VK4MSL-0
    • Mesh Dst: VK4MDL-9
    • Hops: 5

Unlike 802.15.4, we do not have 16-bit short addresses. Since these bits would otherwise always be set to 0, we will use these to provide a 6-bit “hops left” field. We shall use the value 63 (0x3f) to indicate when there are 63 or more hops remaining.

We will use the raw 48-bit addresses here. In keeping with amateur radio conventions, the source and destinations are flipped compared to RFC-4944.

Header format (13 bytes):

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│ 1   0 │       Hops Left       │      Destination Address      │
├───────┴───────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┬───────────────────────────────┤
│                               │         Source Address        │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                                                               │
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┬───────────────────────────────┤
│                               │    Remaining AX.25 Payload    │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                                                               ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘

4. Fragmentation header

To be used when a IPv6 datagram is greater than L bytes, where L may be defined to be between 64 and 216 bytes.

This part is identical to that of RFC-4944 (section 5.3). I’ll come back to this bit.

5. IPv6 datagram

This can be encoded in a number of ways depending on requirements:

5.1. Raw IPv6 datagram

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│ 0   1 │       6LP_IPV6        │                               │
├───────┴───────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                  Raw IPv6 datagram with payload.              ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘

6LP_IPV6 is the value 0x01, as per RFC-4944. The IPv6 datagram is encoded as per RFC-2460, and includes its payload.

The AX.25 frame is finished off with the frame-check sequence.

5.2. Compressed IPv6 datagram

In this format, the datagram fields are compressed, either through making static assumptions, or by deriving them from things such as the AX.25 header, or a previously agreed-to context.

The first field in such payloads is the 6LP_IPHC field:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│ 0   1   1 │               6LP_IPV6 with CID=1                 │
├───────────┴───────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┤
│        Context ID Byte        │                               │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎             Compressed IPv6 datagram with payload.            ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘

or without the context ID

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│ 0   1   1 │               6LP_IPV6 with CID=0                 │
├───────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
╎             Compressed IPv6 datagram with payload.            ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘

The 6LP_IPHC field is a 13-bit field, optionally followed by a context ID extension byte. The bit allocations are as follows:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12
├───┴───┼───┼───┴───┼───┼───┼───┴───┴───┼───┼───┼───┤
│  TF   │ NH│ HLIM  │CID│SAC│  SAM      │ M │DAC│DAM│
└───────┴───┴───────┴───┴───┴───────────┴───┴───┴───┘
  • (MSB) 0-1: TF Traffic Class, Flow Label. See 5.2.1 below.
  • 2: NH Next Header encoding
    • =0: Given explicitly
    • =1: Encoded using 6LP_NHC
  • 3-4: HLIM Hop Limit
    • =00: Given explicitly
    • =01: is set to 1
    • =10: is set to 64
    • =11: is set to 255
  • 5: CID Context Identifier Extension
    • =0: No CID byte follows
    • =1: A CID byte follows
  • 6-8: SAC Source Address Compression / SAM Mode
    • =000: No compression applied, whole address given
    • =001: Prefix is link-local prefix, remaining bits are given.
    • =x10: Not used in 6LoWHAM (we don’t support 16-bit addresses)
    • =011: Prefix is link-local, figure the rest out from the source address in the AX.25 header.
    • =100: Unspecified address ::
    • =101: See the context for the prefix, remaining bits are given.
    • =111: Figure out the address from the AX.25 header and context.
  • (LSB) 9-12: M Multicast, DAC Destination Address Compression
    DAM Mode

    • =0000: No compression, not multicast, whole address given
    • =0001: Prefix is link-local prefix, remaining bits are given. Not multicast.
    • =xx10: Not used in 6LoWHAM (we don’t support 16-bit addresses)
    • =0011: Prefix is link-local, figure the rest out from the destination address in the AX.25 header. Not multicast.
    • =0100: Reserved
    • =0101: See the context for the prefix, remaining bits are given. Not multicast.
    • =0111: Figure out the address from the AX.25 header and context. Not multicast.
    • =1000: No compression, multicast address, whole address given
    • =1001: 48-bits of multicast address given, fill in the blanks: ff__::00__:____:____.
    • =1010: 32-bits of multicast address given, fill in the blanks: ff__::00__:____.
    • =1011: 8-bits of multicast address given, fill in the blanks: ff02::00__.
    • =1100: 48-bits RFC-3306/RFC-3956 address, ff__:__LL:PPPP:PPPP:PPPP:PPPP:____:____ where P and L come from the context.
    • =1101: Reserved
    • =1110: Reserved
    • =1111: Reserved

The context ID extension byte has the following format:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7
├───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┤
│      SCI      │      DCI      │
└───────────────┴───────────────┘
  • (MSB) 0-3: Source Context Identifier
  • (LSB) 4-7: Destination Context Identifier

These two sub-fields indicate which specific context is being used to fill in the blanks.

5.2.1: Traffic Class and Flow Label

These may be partially or completely omitted depending on the TF setting in the previous field.

  • TF=00: 
      0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┤
│  ECN  │         DCSP          │ 0   0   0   0 │               │
├───────┴───────────────────────┴───────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
│                          Flow Label                           │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  • TF=01: 
      0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┼───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│  ECN  │ 0   0 │                                               │
├───────┴───────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┬───────────────────────────────┤
│           Flow Label          │                               │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                   Remainder of IPv6 datagram.                 ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘
  • TF=10: 
      0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│  ECN  │         DCSP          │                               │
├───────┴───────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                   Remainder of IPv6 datagram.                 ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘
  • TF=11: Flow label, ECN and DCSP are set to 0.

5.2.2: Next Header

If 6LP_NHC is not explicitly enabled, the next header byte will appear next.

5.2.3: Hop Limit.

Again, if not explicitly defined in the 6LP_IPHC header, the hop-limit byte will appear next.

5.2.4: Source address

The format here is determined by the values of SAC/SAM:

  • 000: Entire IPv6 address, 16 bytes given here.
  • x01: Last 8-bytes of the address given here
  • For all other values, the source address is omitted.

5.2.5: Destination address

The format here is determined by the values of M/DAC/DAM:

  • x000: Entire IPv6 address, 16 bytes given here.
  • 0x01: Last 8-bytes of the address given here.
  • 1001: 6-bytes of address given here, fill-in-the-blanks.
  • 1010: 4-bytes of address given here, fill-in-the-blanks.
  • 1011: Last byte of address given here, fill-in-the-blank.
  • 1100: 6-bytes of address given here, fill-in-the-blanks.
  • For all other values, the destination address is omitted.

6. 6LoWPAN Next Header

This is used to encode selected IPv6 extensions or L4 protocol headers.

6.1. IPv6 extension headers

A select number of IPv6 extensions may be encoded by replacing the usual “Next Header” byte with the following:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7
├───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┼───┤
│ 1   1   1   0 │    EID    │ N │
└───────────────┴───────────┴───┘

where EID (bits 4-6) is one of:

  • =0 IPv6 Hop-By-Hop options
  • =1 IPv6 Routing
  • =2 IPv6 Fragment
  • =3 IPv6 Destination Options
  • =4 IPv6 Mobility
  • =7 IPv6 Header

and N (bit 7) indicates whether the header’s payload is followed by another 6LowPAN Next Header, or a regular IPv6 Next Header (with its “Next Header” byte). For EID=7, N MUST be 0.

Length fields within the header payload should be counted in bytes instead of 8-byte blocks.

7. Datagram payload

7.1. Non-UDP payloads

For payloads other than UDP packets, these should be inserted into the AX.25 payload as-is following the extensions.

UDP packets with uncompressed headers should also be inserted
in this manner.

7.2. UDP payloads with header compression

For these payloads, the following UDP header should be used:

  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┼───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│ 1   1   1   1   0 │ C │   P   │           Source Port         │
├───────────────────┴───┴───────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                                                               ╎
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
╎                         Destination Port                      ╎
├ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                                                               ╎
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                     Checksum (unless C=1)                     │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
  • (MSB): bits 0-4: Compressed UDP header marker. Literal 11110₂
  • Bit 5: C Compressed UDP checksum
    • 0= UDP checksum is given (recommended value)
    • 1= UDP checksum is omitted
  • Bits 6-7: P Ports
    • 00=Both source and destination addresses are
      given in full

        0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│                         Source Port                           │
├───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                      Destination Port                         │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
    • 01=Source port is given in full, Least significant 8-bits of destination given, destination port is 0xff00-0xffff (65280-65535) 
        0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│                         Source Port                           │
├───────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┤
│       Destination Port        │                               │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                    Remainder of UDP packet                    ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘
    • 10=Destination port is given in full, Least significant 8-bits of source given, source port is 0xff00-0xffff (65280-65535) 
        0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│          Source Port          │        Destination Port       │
├───────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤
│    Destination Port (cont.)   │                               │
├───────────────────────────────┴ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┤
╎                    Remainder of UDP packet                    ╎
└╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌╌┘
    • 11=Only least significant 4-bits of source and destination ports are given. Port LSB range is 0xf0b0-0xf0bf (61616-61631) 
        0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9  10  11  12  13  14  15
├───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┼───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┤
│         Source Port           │       Destination Port        │
└───────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

The C bit should only be set if the upper-level application asks for it. Whilst 802.15.4 does its own CRC as does AX.25, the field is mandatory in UDP and the recommendation is to only drop it if the application says it’s okay.

2018/11/17 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Projects WICEN 0

6LoWHAM: Existing AX.25 software

Having discussed the idea with a few people, both on the linux-hams mailing list and off-list, I’m starting to formalise a few plans for how this might work.

One option is to augment existing software stacks and inter-operate not just over-the-air, but at an API level.  Brisbane WICEN have a fleet of TNCs all running TheNet X1J, which was a popular Net/ROM software stack for TAPR TNC2-compatible TNCs in the early 90s.  Slowly, these are being replaced with Raspberry Pis equipped with Pi-TNCs and running LinBPQ.

These two inter-operate quite well, and the plan looks to be, to slowly upgrade all the sites to LinBPQ nodes.

Now, 6LoWHAM on TNCs that are nearly as old as I am just isn’t going to fly, but if I can link up to LinBPQ, this alternate protocol can be packaged up and installed along-side LinBPQ in an unobtrusive manner.

There are two things I need to be able to do:

  • Send and receive raw AX.25 frames
  • Read the routing table from LinBPQ

Sending and receiving raw frames

Looking at the interfaces that LinBPQ (and BPQ32) offers, the most promising option looks to be the AGWPE-compatible interface.  The protocol is essentially a TCP link over which the AX.25 frames are encapsulated and sent.

There’s a good description of the protocol here, and looking at the sources for LinBPQ (third link from the bottom of the page), it looks as if the necessary bits of the protocol are present to send and receive raw frames.

In particular, to send raw UI frames, I need to send these as ‘M’ (direct) or ‘V’ frames (via digipeater), and to receive them, I need to make use of the monitoring mode (‘m’ frame).

Reading the routing table

This, is where things will be “fun”.  The AGWPE interface does offer a “heard” frame, which can report on what stations have been heard.  This I think isn’t going to be the holy grail I’m after, although it’ll be a start, maybe.

Alternatively, a way around this might be to “eavesdrop” on the Net/ROM routing frames.  In monitor mode, I should theoretically hear all traffic, including these Net/ROM beacons.  It’s not as nice as being able to simply read LinBPQ’s routing table, but at least I don’t have to generate the Net/ROM messages.

The other way would be to connect to the terminal interface on LinBPQ, and use the NODES command, parsing that.  Ugly, but it’ll get me by.  On that same page is NRR… which looks to be similar in function to TCP/IP’s traceroute.  The feature is also supported by JNOS 2.0, which was released in 2006.  Not old by packet radio standards, but old enough.

Identifying if a remote station supports 6LoWHAM

Now, this is the tricky bit.  Identifying an immediate neighbour is easy enough, you can simply send an ICMPv6 neighbour solicitation message and see if they respond.  In fact, I’m thinking that could be the immediate first step.  There’s no support for service discovery as such, but nodes could advertise an “alias” (just one).

The best bet may be a suck-it-and-see approach.  We should be able to “digipeat” via intermediate nodes as if they were plain L2 AX.25 digipeaters, thus if we have a reason to contact a given node (i.e. there’s unicast traffic queued up to be sent there), we can just try routing an AX.25 frame with a ICMPv6 neighbour solicitation and see if we get a neighbour advertisement.

This carries a risk though: a station may not react well to unknown traffic and may try to parse the message as something it is not.  Thus for unicast, it is not a fail-safe method.

Multicast traffic however will be a challenge, and much of IPv6 relies on multicast.  The Net/ROM station will not know anything about this, as it simply wasn’t a concept back in the day.

For subnets like ff03::1, which on Thread networks usually means “all full-function Thread devices”, this could be sent via non-6LoWHAM digipeaters by broadcasting via that digipeater to the AX.25 station alias “6LHMC” (6LoWHAM Multicast).

This could be used to provide tunnelling of multicast traffic where a route to a station has been discovered via Net/ROM and we need to safely test whether the station can in fact understand 6LoWHAM traffic without the risk of crashing it.

I think the next step might be to look at how a normal IPv6 node would “register” interest in a multicast group so that routers between it and the sender of such a group know where to forward traffic.  IPv6 does have such a mechanism, and I think understanding how multicast traverses subnets is going to be key to making this work.

2018/11/15 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Projects Public Syndication WICEN 0

6LoWHAM: ARQ over a “mesh” network

So earlier, I had mentioned that it’s really not desirable to have ARQ (automatic repeat request) on a link carrying TCP datagrams.  My comment is based on this observation:

http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html

In that article, the discussion is about one TCP connection being tunnelled over another TCP connection.  Basically it comes down to the lower layer buffering and re-sending the TCP datagrams just as the upper layer gives up on hearing a reply and re-sends its own attempt.

Now, end-to-end ACKs have been done on long chains of AX.25 networks before.  It’s generally accepted to be an unreliable mechanism.  UDP for sure can benefit, but then many protocols that use UDP already do their own handling of lost messages.  CoAP for instance does its own ARQ, as does TFTP.

Gerald Wagenknecht, Markus Anwander and Torsten Braun discuss some of the impacts of this on a 802.15.4 network in their thesis “Hop-to-Hop Reliability in IP-based Wireless Sensor Networks – a Cross-Layer Approach“.  In this, they talk about a variant of TCP called TSS: TCP Support for Sensor Networks.  This was discussed at depth in a thesis by Adam Dunkels, “Towards TCP/IP for Wireless Sensor Networks“.

This latter document, was apparently the inspiration for 6LoWPAN.  Section 4.4.3 discusses the approaches to handling ARQ in TCP.  Section 9.6 goes into further detail on how ARQ might be handled elsewhere in the network.

Thankfully in our case, it’s only the network that’s constrained, the nodes themselves will be no smaller than a Raspberry Pi which would have held its own against the PC that Adam Dunkels used to write that thesis!

In short, it looks as if just routing IP packets is not going to cut it, we need to actually handle the TCP side of things as well.  As for other protocols like CoAP, I guess the answer is be patient.  The timeout settings defined in RFC-7252 are usually tuneable, and it may be desirable to back those off just a little for use over AX.25.

2018/10/27 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Homebrew Projects Public Syndication Thinktank WICEN 0

6LoWHAM Research

So, doing some more digging here.  One question people might ask is what kind of applications would I use over this network?

Bear in mind that it’s running at 1200 baud!  If we use HTTP at all, tiny is the word!  No bloated images, and definitely no big heavy JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS, Angular, DoJo or JQuery.  You can forget watching Netflicks in 4k over this link.

HTTP really isn’t designed for low-bandwidth links, as Steve Netting demonstrated:

The page itself is bad enough, but even then, it’s loaded after a minute.  The real slow bit is the 20kB GIF.

So yeah, slow-scan television, the ability to send weather radar images over, that is something I was thinking of, but not like that!

HTTP uses pretty verbose headers:

GET /qld/forecasts/brisbane.shtml?ref=hdr HTTP/1.1
Host: www.bom.gov.au
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-AU,en-GB;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR664.loop.shtml
Cookie: bom_meteye_windspeed_units_knots=yes
Connection: keep-alive
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Server: Apache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 6321
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2018 10:56:12 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

That request is 508 bytes and the response headers are 216 bytes.  It’d be inappropriate on 6LoWPAN as you’d be fragmenting that packet left right and centre in order to squeeze it into the 128-byte 802.15.4 frames.

In that video, ICMP echo requests were also demonstrated, and those weren’t bad!  Yes, a little slow, but workable.  So to me, it’s not the packet network that’s the problem, it’s just that something big like HTTP is just not appropriate for a 1200-baud radio link.

It might work on 9600 baud packet … maybe.  My Kantronics KPC3 doesn’t do 9600 baud over the air.

CoAP was designed for tight messages.  It is UDP based, so your TCP connection overhead disappears, and the “options” are encoded as individual bytes in many cases.  There are other UDP-based protocols that would work fine too, as well as older TCP protocols such as Telnet.

A request, and reply in CoAP look something like this:

Hex dump of request:
00000000  40 01 00 01 3b 65 78 61  6d 70 6c 65 2e 63 6f 6d   @...;exa mple.com
00000010  81 63 03 52 46 77 11 3c                            .c.RFw.< 

Hex dump of response:
    00000000  60 45 00 01 c1 3c ff a1  1a 00 01 11 70 a1 01 a3   `E...<.. ....p...
    00000010  04 18 64 02 6b 31 39 32  2e 31 36 38 2e 30 2e 31   ..d.k192 .168.0.1
    00000020  03 64 65 74 68 30                                  .deth0

Or in more human readable form:

Request:
Constrained Application Protocol, Confirmable, GET, MID:1
    01.. .... = Version: 1
    ..00 .... = Type: Confirmable (0)
    .... 0000 = Token Length: 0
    Code: GET (1)
    Message ID: 1
    Opt Name: #1: Uri-Host: example.com
        Opt Desc: Type 3, Critical, Unsafe
        0011 .... = Opt Delta: 3
        .... 1011 = Opt Length: 11
        Uri-Host: example.com
    Opt Name: #2: Uri-Path: c
        Opt Desc: Type 11, Critical, Unsafe
        1000 .... = Opt Delta: 8
        .... 0001 = Opt Length: 1
        Uri-Path: c
    Opt Name: #3: Uri-Path: RFw
        Opt Desc: Type 11, Critical, Unsafe
        0000 .... = Opt Delta: 0
        .... 0011 = Opt Length: 3
        Uri-Path: RFw
    Opt Name: #4: Content-Format: application/cbor
        Opt Desc: Type 12, Elective, Safe
        0001 .... = Opt Delta: 1
        .... 0001 = Opt Length: 1
        Content-type: application/cbor
    [Uri-Path: coap://example.com/c/RFw]

Response:
Constrained Application Protocol, Acknowledgement, 2.05 Content, MID:1
    01.. .... = Version: 1
    ..10 .... = Type: Acknowledgement (2)
    .... 0000 = Token Length: 0
    Code: 2.05 Content (69)
    Message ID: 1
    Opt Name: #1: Content-Format: application/cbor
        Opt Desc: Type 12, Elective, Safe
        1100 .... = Opt Delta: 12
        .... 0001 = Opt Length: 1
        Content-type: application/cbor
    End of options marker: 255
    Payload: Payload Content-Format: application/cbor, Length: 31
        Payload Desc: application/cbor
        [Payload Length: 31]
Concise Binary Object Representation
    Map: (1 entries)
        Unsigned Integer: 70000
            Map: (1 entries)
                ...0 0001 = Unsigned Integer: 1
                    Map: (3 entries)
                        ...0 0100 = Unsigned Integer: 4
                            Unsigned Integer: 100
                        ...0 0010 = Unsigned Integer: 2
                            Text String: 192.168.0.1
                        ...0 0011 = Unsigned Integer: 3
                            Text String: eth0

That there, also shows another tool to data packing: CBOR.  CBOR is basically binary JSON.  Just like JSON it is schemaless, it has objects, arrays, strings, booleans, nulls and numbers (CBOR differentiates between integers of various sizes and floats).  Unlike JSON, it is tight.  The CBOR blob in this response would look like this as JSON (in the most compact representation possible):

{70000:{4:100,2:"192.168.0.1",3:"eth0"}}

The entire exchange is 190 bytes, less than a quarter of the size of just the HTTP request alone.  I think that would work just fine over 1200 baud packet.  As a bonus, you can also multicast, try doing that with HTTP.

So you’d be writing higher-level services that would use this instead of JSON-REST interfaces.  There’s a growing number of libraries that can consume this sort of thing, and IoT is pushing that further.  I think it’s doable.

Now, on the routing front, I’ve been digging up a bit on Net/ROM.  Net/ROM is actually two parts, Net/ROM Level 3 does the routing and level 4 does the circuit switching.  It’s the “Level 3” bit we want.

Coming up with a definitive specification of the protocol has been a bit tough, it doesn’t help that there is a company called NetROM, but I did manage to find this document.  In a way, if I could make my software behave like a Net/ROM node, I could piggy-back off that to discover neighbours.  Thus this protocol would co-exist along side Net/ROM networks that may be completely oblivious to TCP/IP.

This is preferable to just re-inventing the wheel…yes I know non-circular wheels are so much fun!  Really, once Net/ROM L3 has figured out where everyone is, IP routing just becomes a matter of correctly addressing the AX.25 frame so the next hop receives the message.

VK4RZB at Mt. Coot-tha is one such node running TheNet.  Easy enough to do tests on as it’s a mere stone throw away from my home QTH.

There’s a little consideration to make about how to label the AX.25 frame.  Obviously, it’ll be a UI frame, but what PID field should I use?  My instinct suggests that I should just label it as “ARPA Internet Protocol”, since it is Internet Protocol traffic, just IPv6 instead of v4.  Not all the codes are taken though, 0xc9 is free, so I could be cheeky and use that instead.  If the idea takes off, we can talk with the TAPR then.

2018/10/20 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Homebrew Projects Public Syndication Thinktank WICEN 0

Mapping call-signs to “hardware” addresses

This is another brain dump of ideas.

So, part of me wants to consider the idea of using amateur radio as a transmission mechanism for 6LoWPAN.  The idea being that we use NET/ROM and AX.25 or similar schemes as a transport mechanism for delivering shortened IPv6 packets.  Over this, we can use standard TCP/IP programming to write applications.

Protocols designed for low-bandwidth constrained networks are ideal here, so things like CoAP where emphasis is placed on compact representation.  6LoWPAN normally runs over IEEE 802.15.4 which has a payload limit of 128 bytes.  AX.25 has a limit of 256 bytes, so is already doing better.

The thinking is that I “encode” the call-sign into a “hardware” address.  MAC addresses are nominally 48-bits, although the IEEE is trying to phase that out in favour of 64-bit EUIs.  Officially the IEEE looks after this, so we want to avoid doing things that might clash with their system.

A EUI-48 (MAC) address is 6-bytes long, where the first 3 bytes identify the type of address and the organisation, and the latter 3 bytes identify an individual device.  The least significant two bits of the first byte are flags that decide whether the address is unicast or local, and whether it is globally administered (by the IEEE) or locally administered.

To avoid complications, we should probably keep the unicast bit cleared to indicate that these addresses are unicast addresses.

Some might argue that the ITU assigns prefixes to countries, and these countries have national bodies that hand out callsigns, thus we could consider callsigns as “globally administered”.  Truth is, the IEEE has nothing to do with the process, and could very legitimately assign the EUI-48 prefix 56-4b-34 to a company… in that hypothetical scenario, there goes all the addresses that might represent amateur operators stationed in Queensland.  So let’s call these “locally administered”, since there are suffixes the user may choose (e.g. “/P”).

That gives us 46-bits to play with.  7-bit ASCII just fits 6 characters, which would just fit the callsigns used in AX.25 with enough room for a 4-bit SSID.  We don’t need all 128 characters though, and a scheme based on DEC’s Radix50 can pack in far more.

We can get 8 arbitrary Radix50 characters into 43 bits, which gives us 3 left over which can be used as the user wishes.  We’ll probably call it the SSID, but unlike AX.25, will be limited from 0-7.  The user can always use the least significant character in their callsign field for an additional 6 bits, which gives them 9 bits to play with.  (i.e. “VK4MSL-1″#0 to encode the AX.25 SSID “VK4MSL-10”)

Flip the multicast bit, and we’ve got a group address.

SLAAC derives the IPv6 address from the EUI-48, so the IPv6 address will effectively encode the callsigns of the two communicating stations.  If both are on the same “mesh”, then we can probably borrow ideas from 6LoWPAN for shortening that address.

2018/10/10 by 6LoWHAM Amateur Radio Computing Emergency Communications Projects Public Syndication Thinktank WICEN 2

6LoWHAM Background

So, I’ll admit to looking at AX.25 with the typical modems available (the classical 1200-baud AFSK and the more modern G3RUH modem which runs at a blistering 9600 baud… look out 5G!) years ago and wondering “what’s the point”?

It was Brisbane Area WICEN’s involvement in the International Rally of Queensland that changed my view somewhat.  This was an event that, until CAMS knocked it on the head, ran annually in the Imbil State Forest up in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

There, WICEN used it for forwarding the scores of drivers as they passed through each stage of the rally.  A checkpoint would be at the start and finish of each stage, and a packet network would be set up with digipeaters in strategic locations and a base station, often located at the Imbil school.

The organisers of IRoQ did experiment with other ways of getting scores through, including hiring bandwidth on satellites, flying planes around in circles over the area, and other shenanigans.  Although these systems had faster throughput speeds, one thing they had which we did not have, was latency.  The score would arrive back at base long before the car had left the check point.

This freed up the analogue FM network for reporting other more serious matters.

In addition to this kind of work, WICEN also help out with horse endurance rides.  Traditionally we’ve just relied on good ol’e analogue FM radio, but in events such as the Tom Quilty, there has been a desire to use packet as a mechanism for reporting when horses arrive at given checkpoints and to perhaps enable autonomous stations that can detect horses via RFID and report those “back to base” to deter riders from cheating.

The challenge of AX.25 is two-fold:

  1. With the exception of Linux, no other OS has any kind of baked-in support for it, so writing applications that can interact with it means either implementing your own AX.25 stack or interfacing to some third-party stack such as BPQ.
  2. Due to the specialised stack, applications often have to run as privileged applications, can have problems with firewalling, etc.

The AX.25 protocol does do static routing.  It offers connected-mode links (like TCP) and a connectionless-mode (like UDP), and there are at least two routing protocols I know of that allow for dynamic routing (ROSE, Net/ROM).  There is a standard for doing IPv4 over AX.25, but you still need to manage the allocation of addresses and other details, it isn’t plug-and-play.

Net/ROM would make an ideal way to forward 6LoWPAN traffic, except it only does connected mode, and doing IP over a “TCP-like” link is really a bad idea.  (Anything that does automatic repeat requests really messes with TCP/IP.)

I have no idea whether ROSE does the connectionless mode, but the idea of needing to come up with a 10-digit numeric “address” is a real turn-off.

If the address used can be derived off the call-sign of the operator, that makes life a lot easier.

The IPv6 address format has enough bits to do that.  To me the most obvious way would be to derive a MAC address from a call-sign and an arbitrarily chosen digit (0-7).  It would be reversible of course, and since the MAC address is used in SLAAC, you would see the station’s call-sign in the IPv6 address.

The thinking is that there’s a lot of problems that have been solved in 6LoWPAN.  Discovery of services for example is handled using mechanisms like mDNS and CoRE RD.  We don’t need to forward Internet traffic, although being able to pull up the Mt. Kanigan and Mt. Stapylton radars over such a network would be real handy at times (yes, I know it’ll be slow).

The OS will view the packet network like a VPN, and so writing applications that can talk over packet will be no different to writing any other kind of network software.  Any consumer desktop OS written in the last 16 years has the necessary infrastructure to support it (even Windows 2000, there was a downloadable add-on for it).

Linking two separate “mesh” networks via point-to-point links is also trivial.  Each mesh will of course see the other as “external” but participants on both can nonetheless communicate.

The guts of 6LoWPAN is in RFC-4944.  This specifies details about how the IPv6 datagram is encoded as a IEEE 802.15.4 payload, and how the infrastructure within 802.15.4 is used to route IPv6.  Gnarly details like how fragmentation of a 1280-byte IPv6 datagram into something that will fit the 128-byte maximum 802.15.4 frames is handled here.  For what it’s worth, AX.25 allows 255 bytes (or was it 256?), so we’re ahead there.

Crucially, it is assumed that the 802.15.4 layer can figure out how to get from node A to node Z via B… C…, etc.  802.15.4 networks are managed by a PAN coordinator, which provides various services to the network.

AX.25 makes this “our problem”.  Yes the sender of a frame can direct which digipeaters a frame should be passed to, but they have to figure that out.  It’s like sending an email by UUCP, you need a map of the Internet to figure out what someone’s address is relative to your site.

Plain AX.25 digipeaters will of course be part of the mix, so having the ability for a node stuck on one side of such a digipeater would be worth having, but ultimately, the aim here will be to provide a route discovery mechanism in place that, knowing a few static digipeater routes, can figure out who is able to hear whom, and route traffic accordingly.

2018/10/03 by 6LoWHAM Emergency Communications Homebrew Projects WICEN 0

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