I’m happy to announce release 0.5.0 of my M17 Go tools project at github.com/jancona/m17 with some significant updates!
Three hardware platforms, full M17 feature support
m17-gateway now supports three different modem/hardware platforms:
- CC1200 Pi HAT — the original supported hardware
- SX1255 Pi HAT — newly supported this month
- MMDVM-compatible hotspots and modems — for those who already have MMDVM hardware
All three give you the full M17 feature set, including voice, SMS messaging, and GNSS-based station position mapping — features that many other M17 hotspot platforms don’t support.
Both the SX1255 and MMDVM platforms support full duplex operation, which means they can be used as full M17 repeaters — not just hotspots. If you’ve been thinking about putting up an M17 repeater, this is a viable path.
Getting started
The easiest way to get a working hotspot is DK1MI’s installer script, which sets up m17-gateway along with a web dashboard. If you just want the gateway itself, pre-built .deb packages for arm64 are on the releases page, or you can build it yourself from the instructions in the README.
Also in the project: an experimental messaging bridge
There’s also a new and very experimental tool called m17-bridge that connects M17 SMS traffic to Discord, IRC, and APRS. It’s not ready for production use yet, but in the next month or two I plan to stand up a public example node so folks can experiment with it. Stay tuned!
Latest release is v0.5.1. Full source, docs, and binaries at: https://github.com/jancona/m17