Build Your Own Gateway Navigation:
Build Your Own Gateway – Welcome
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 1: What You’ll Need
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 2: Installing SVXLink
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 3: Configuring SVXLink
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 4: Connecting To The Radio
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 5: Programming the Radio
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 6: Connecting to the Reflector
Build Your Own Gateway – Part 7: Adjusting Audio Levels

Page last updated: 24th October 2022

Installing SVXLink

I’d strongly recommend installing SVXLINK on a raspberry Pi, using the most up to date image available below. This is the simpliest way of getting up and running with SVXLINK.

If, however you feel comfortable with installing packages manually, please do feel free to follow the steps below to install SVXLink on Debian.

You can confirm that SVXLink is installed by confirming svxlink.conf and svxreflector.conf existing within /etc/svxlink.

For Raspberry Pi users, it's as simple as writing the download image (Download from here: http://leipzig2000.dyndns.org:4047/  - scroll towards the bottom of the page to find the link) to your 8GB (or larger) SD card, inserting the card into your Pi and booting it up.

To write the image to your SD card, you'll need a copy of Raspberry Pi Imager tool.

Once you have written the image to the SD card, insert it into your Raspberry Pi (3B or newer), boot the Pi, wait aprox 5 minutes and then check your routers DHCP address lists to locate the IP of the Pi.

Then, using your favorite SSH tool, SSH into the Pi on port 22 using default username: pi and password: raspberry

Be sure to check for software updates after connecting to the Pi, with the usual commands:

sudo apt-get update

You can then check for SVXLINK updates using the following commands (this is important as the software is updated regularly):

sudo systemctl stop svxlink
cd /home/pi/svxlink/src/build
sudo git pull
sudo make install
sudo systemctl start svxlink

Important: The below steps include the installation of debian packages, which at the time of writing are the current available versions. When you go to install these packages, you may find that they have been replaced with a newer version. to locate the newer version, google "apt-get install PACKAGENAME" and replace the package name below with the updated name.

 

You'll find the most up to date installation steps available here: svxlink/README-Tetra at tetra-contrib · dl1hrc/svxlink · GitHub

 

Install steps:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install g++ libsigc++-2.0-dev libgsm1-dev libpopt-dev tcl-dev libgcrypt20-dev libspeex-dev libasound2-dev make alsa-utils git cmake libqt4-dev libopus-dev opus-tools libcurl4-gnutls-dev libjsoncpp-dev

 

sudo addgroup --gid 496 svxlink
sudo useradd -r -g daemon svxlink

 

wget https://github.com/dl1hrc/svxlink/archive/refs/heads/tetra-contrib.zip

 

Unzip tetra-contrib.zip

 

Cd /svxlink-tetra-contrib/src
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc -DLOCAL_STATE_DIR=/var ..
make
make doc
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

 

cd
cd /svxlink-tetra-contrib
Mkdir sounds
Cd sounds

 

wget https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink-sounds-en_US-heather/archive/refs/tags/19.09.tar.gz
tar -xf 19.09.tar.gz
sudo mkdir /usr/share/svxlink/sounds/en_US
sudo cp -a 19.09/* /usr/share/svxlink/sounds/en_US      (check the file path of the source files)

 

You can then check for SVXLINK updates using the following commands (this is important as the software is updated regularly):

 

sudo systemctl stop svxlink
cd /home/pi/svxlink/src/build
sudo git pull
sudo make install
sudo systemctl start svxlink

Build Your Own Gateway – Part 3: Configuring SVXLink >