#irlp

So I’m the administrator of my HAM clubs IRLP node. One of the nodes tasks is to re-broadcast the Wireless Institute of Australia’s news service once a week. All going well it’ll do this on Sunday morning and maybe 1/2 dozen people listen in. (Who really knows how many people listen on the radio?) That means that each week the node has to download the latest version of the news, which is an MP3 file. Now for some reason this has been quite problematic. 

There is a Yahoo group for the news service, however only the owner of the group can post to it, so zero support. :-(

Happily the owner does say that we’re welcome to write to him if we see issues. So I shot a note off detailing my problem and asking if he was aware of anyone else seeing issues. 

I never saw a reply, but I did see that the message published in group when the news was published each week change to say that the method I was using to get the news files was never to be used, other than as back up. All done in caps, i.e. internet speak for shouting. Again, zero support. :-(

Perhaps if there was some two way comms I could have got some guidance on how it should all be set up when I took the role over and moved the node to Pi-IRLP, and everyone would be better off. But no, I had to invent the wheel all over again.

I concluded that my download stalling issue was related to a Linux problem with the SACK packet, and made a change recommended in point 2 here. Why the node had this issue and none of my other systems ever have I don’t know.

That still left the news being downloaded from the backup site. While the previous administrators didn’t seem to fussed about pulling from the backup site, I would prefer to do the right thing. 

The issue with the primary WIA site is that the file name includes the intended date of broadcast, and so changes every week. Whereas the back up site has a standard name and location, and the file is updated each week. Simply trying to grab the same file each week, which is how the node was historically set up, simply won’t work from what’s intended to be the primary site.

Since the news is published in an RSS feed as a podcast I figured I should try using an RSS Podcatcher. After some hunting and a couple of false starts I found the quite excellent ‘Greg’. Greg is capable of doing lots of clever things, but as a command line tool it’s capable of some manipulation, perfect for my application of grabbing a single file. 

I did come across an issue with Greg. The author was very responsive and helpful, for which I was grateful. Ultimately the issue was fixed by upgrading the node from Wheezy to Jessie, which also upgraded Python.   

The Jessie upgrade introduced an issue with the USB sound card, which was fixed following the tips in response 2, here. Specifically:

There is a file called aliases.conf in /lib/modprobe.d which contains the line options snd-usb-audio index=-2. That line overrides the /etc/modprobe.d/ files, so you need to change that one. Comment out with a # the line options snd-usb-audio index=-2

Lastly I wrote a BASH script that utilizes Greg to grab the news each week. The script checks that it’s been successful. If it hasn’t then it calls the ‘old’ news download script to grab from the backup site, as is intended. The script sends out an email to let me know if it worked. Giving me time sort any issues out ahead of the broadcast time. The script is up on Github for anyone that’s interested.

https://github.com/TypeFaster2/IRLP

I’m sure anyone who has real programming skills will groan, but it’s worked for me so far. I still have no idea how anyone else does it. 

The WIA news team do a great job of putting together a very high quality news broadcast every week. I’m sure it’s time consuming and tough when there’s not a lot in the way of contributions. But perhaps if they were a bit more communicative I could have benefited from work already done by them or other re-broadcast stations, and I wouldn’t have needed to do any of this. Or just maybe my work might be of use to others.

Nepal on IRLP 5511 and EchoLink:

April 17, 2016 at 06:21PM

http://ift.tt/1QgQQpc The repeater in Kathmandu is now on EchoLink and IRLP — IRLP node number is 5511. http://ift.tt/eA8V8J

http://www.eham.net/