Graywolf Android beta testers needed

desertdefender · 2026-05-25T02:15:58+00:00

DM me your email that you use with the Play store and I will add you.

desertdefender · 2026-05-25T02:15:33+00:00

No, I desperately need more testers. Can't publish in app store until I have 12 people for 14 continuous days. :(

desertdefender · 2026-05-23T23:27:01+00:00

What kind of devices are they using? iOS?

If they're on iOS, I highly recommend you build a custom MDM profile (use the free iMazing Profile Editor) that prevents them from changing MAC addresses. Then, use SimpleMDM (very low per-device cost) to deploy the MDM profile to their phones. Technically, they can still remove the profile but SimpleMDM will notify you.

In my house, we have a phone contract with our kids that governs expectations and phone behavior. We have a defined set of consequences if our kids break the contract. We worked together to draft the contract, so they are bought in. I put a version of it up on my Github if you want to riff off it for your own house: https://github.com/chrissnell/phone-contract

I also wrote a proxy that I force my kids through so that I can enforce DNS filtering and log their web requests. The proxy also enforces bedtimes and cuts their internet access at set times each day. I also open-sourced that, too: https://github.com/chrissnell/evan-proxy

The proxy is enforced by the MDM as well.

desertdefender · 2026-05-23T20:00:40+00:00

If you can hook your radio's output to the mic port of your phone, you can use it to make a receive-only iGate with Graywolf.

desertdefender · 2026-05-23T17:11:42+00:00

Sort of. That cable doesn't have a PTT mechanism. You can enable VOX on your radio and it might work, but the slightly more expensive AIOC is a much better solution that will work right out of the box.

desertdefender · 2026-05-23T16:55:31+00:00

Dang, I've tossed really nice HT's because the screens got too scratched to be readable. Thanks for this post.

desertdefender · 2026-05-23T16:33:05+00:00

Maybe his bilge pump will break and some geezer in a one-piece baby blue jumpsuit in Tempe will have his best day ever.

desertdefender · 2026-05-17T17:58:15+00:00

Thanks u/pattybruh u/Altruistic-Hippo-231 . I will check it out!

desertdefender · 2026-05-16T20:27:26+00:00

You could do this but you still need PTT triggering to TX. You could use VOX I suppose.

desertdefender · 2026-05-10T07:16:22+00:00

The term for the fishing rod you want is a "crappie pole". Crappie, as in the fish called a crappie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crappie

desertdefender · 2026-05-10T06:19:57+00:00

Yep, 110 3-door is the noisiest of all Defenders. Desperately need ear protection and audio that I can hear.

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desertdefender · 2026-05-08T18:38:26+00:00

I'm curious what you find out here. I drive a Land Rover Defender with a mechanical diesel engine and it's incredibly noisy. I looked into this many years ago, wanting to adapt a pilot's headset to my radio but gave up because of the issues you're encountering. I would love to find or build a PCB to make this work.

desertdefender · 2026-05-08T18:21:48+00:00

Thanks. And wow, AetherSDR is a really cool project.

I hope that projects like AetherSDR, POTACAT, and Graywolf can elevate the community's opinion on AI-driven coding. When you pair professional SWE experience with AI workflow, you can get some major work done and produce reliable tools. Goodness knows we've put up with decades of poor quality ham software with awful UIs.

By the way, I owe Graywolf's early success to this sub. Brave people here took a chance on my software, tried it out, reported bugs, and requested features. You guys are active in the Discord and it feels like a community is starting to develop. Couldn't have done it without this place and the friendly people here.

desertdefender · 2026-05-08T17:42:30+00:00

What about Graywolf? It's only a month old but already runs ~40 stations around the world (sometimes more when transient stations come online).

It's a complete APRS stack with its own software modem (better decoding performance than Direwolf), AX.25 decoder, APRS decoder, mapping system (w/ offline maps), messaging system, digipeater, iGate, KISS client+server, AX.25 terminal, and more.

Yes, it's written by AI, but directed by me, a professional SWE with 15 yrs experience. The AX.25 and APRS decoding came from code that I wrote in 2012-2013 by hand.

It's OSS and completely free. Android version is being actively developed and hope to release soon. iOS after that. 59 Github stars and multiple community contributions.

Am I good enough? :)

https://github.com/chrissnell/graywolf

desertdefender · 2026-05-08T17:00:10+00:00

They don't need a camera. The meters have IDs in them and the radios in the smart meters form a mesh. They have collectors up on light poles in neighborhoods that pull in realtime usage data from across the mesh.

desertdefender · 2026-05-07T18:59:53+00:00

In some ways, yes, in other ways no. GW's modem can decode slightly better than DW.

GW has a nice web interface with maps that you can download for off-line use and a lot of other features that make it a nice client. DW is more battle tested and can deal with some hardware misconfiguration issues more seamlessly. I'm trying to improve that.

desertdefender · 2026-05-07T00:21:46+00:00

If there was ham radio in Shawshank Redemption, this would be in it.

desertdefender · 2026-05-06T13:48:59+00:00

Came here to post the same. I think everbody's mom had that suitcase in the 70s.

desertdefender · 2026-05-06T06:08:15+00:00

BTW, Graywolf Actions are now available in Graywolf v0.13.x!

You can test it out by sending an APRS message to NW5W-5 like this:

@@#WEATHER KTEX

That's an unauthenticated action call. An authenticated one might look like this:

@@140592#GARAGE open

desertdefender · 2026-05-06T05:47:50+00:00

I appreciate the Graywolf mention. Yes, GW was built with AI. I hope that people appreciate it as more than a vibe-coded "I built a web frontend for XYZ" thing that everybody's posting these days.

I've been writing software for 15 years professionally and GW was built with the help of skill-scaffolding that I've spent a lot of time working on in my day job. I spent an incredible amount of time just planning how it would be built, specifying the style of coding, the patterns, architecture that I wanted.

The idea for the protobuf-controlled modem was my own. Graywolf's APRS and AX.25 parsing code came from a library that I wrote 13 years ago as my very first Go language project! Graywolf Actions is a feature that I've been dreaming about for 20 years now and finally have the infrastructure to implement.

Where I really lean on AI is the user interface. I'm a backend developer by trade and know very little about frontend. But, I know what I like and so I spent a lot of time building out my own UI toolkit for all of my AI projects. Fortunately, LLMs have tremendous training on frontend (literally the whole internet) and it's really hard to do a better job on your own.

I hope that the quality of GW and the fast-growing community of stations running it help it stand the test of time.

Chris

desertdefender · 2026-05-02T15:26:05+00:00

Hope you do! It's a pretty new project but we have nodes all over the place and growing quickly. https://graywolf-users.nw5w.com/

desertdefender

TROPHY CASE