I decided that I wanted to run an APRS iGate at my house because I found that low power transmissions in my neighborhood simply aren’t making it to the nearest Digipeater.

My current setup is a Mobilinkd 4 + iPhone SE 2020 + aprs.fi — but it’s not working very reliably — What I’m finding that is that every 2-3 days it stops beaconing and stops receiving packets… if I unlock the iPhone and fiddle it starts working, I’ll get a day or two, and then it will stop. My assumption is that iOS is simply not geared to run background applications like this and so it doesn’t work as a “set it and forget it” type of system.

That lead me to a purchase I made a long time ago… When I was first getting into APRS I bought a Coastal Chipworks TNC-Pi — it’s a TNC in the form of a Raspberry Pi “hat”, and I recall that it worked fairly well at the time using a Raspberry Pi 3B. I don’t fully recall what my goal at the time was, but it was using in a vehicle and ultimately when I found the Mobilinkd that worked out better. I parked the hardware, but pulled the Micro-SD.

Fast-forward a decade or so and I’ve decided to resurrect the TNC-Pi in the hopes that I can use it as an iGate and doing RF beaconing.

I’m grateful that despite having not sold this product for quite a while (I think over 5 years at this point?) the website linked above is still operational with instructions and files… but what I found was that time marched on in the world of Raspberry Pi development and left these little setup/helper apps behind.

If you try to run pitnc_getparams and see this message:

-bash: ./pitnc_getparams: cannot execute: required file not found

That means you’re likely running a 64-bit version of Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS, but these applications are built for 32-bit.

You have two options:

1. Install a 32-bit version of Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS
2. Install the required 32-bit libraries

If you decide to take the option 2 route — installing 32-bit libraries — these are the two fairly straight-forward commands I had to run to get going:

sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
sudo apt install libc6:armhf

After that, you’ll find that both 32-bit helper applications are able to run on your 64-bit OS.