On-air safety¶

astar keys real transmitters. This page is the short version of everything that means, and it is not optional reading.

You are the licensed operator¶

Operating any of this requires an appropriate amateur radio licence for your jurisdiction, and the control operator is responsible for every transmission their station makes — including the ones a computer initiated on their behalf.

Station identification, band and mode privileges, third-party traffic rules, and unattended-operation rules are all yours to satisfy. astar does not know your callsign rules, your licence class, or your local regulator.

Never transmit autonomously¶

The rule

Connecting to a live node or reflector and keying a transmitter are deliberate human actions. No script, no scheduled job, no automated test, and no agent gets to do it.

Concretely, in this project:

Automated tests must not key a transmitter and must not reach anything outside 127.0.0.1. Self-hosted loopback targets — a local parrot, a local reflector — are the only legitimate test destinations.
The hardware-touching test suites skip by default. They run only when IAX_THUMBDV_TESTS=1 is set explicitly, and that variable exists so that a machine with a dongle attached opts in, not so that CI opts everyone in.
Remote keying through astar-server's POST /key is an operator-supervised action on a loopback-bound control port. It is not an automation hook.

Two guards that must not be removed¶

These are not defensive coding. They are the difference between a bug and an unattended transmission.

The ThumbDV port pin only narrows the scan¶

IAX_THUMBDV_PORT filters the results of the FTDI 0x0403:0x6015 scan for a D-Star vocoder dongle. It can select among ports the scan already matched. It can never replace the scan or point the opener at an arbitrary serial port.

The reason is physical: opening a USB radio interface's tty asserts RTS, and RTS is the radio-key line. A pin that could name any port would be a remote transmit button disguised as a convenience feature.

A port the scan did not match yields no candidates, and the open fails. That is the correct behaviour.

The daemon refuses to key during a D-Star session¶

astar-server will not honour a remote key command while a D-Star session is active:

refusing to key: a D-Star session is active and
D-Star transmit is not remotely keyable

D-Star is the one network the daemon must never key remotely. IAX2 and M17 are remotely keyable by design; D-Star is not, and the check lives at the caller so it cannot be bypassed by reaching the station directly.

Listening is always safe¶

If you only want to hear what is happening, astar has a TX disabled — listening only mode, and links can be established as monitor-only (*2 / "action": "monitor"), which receives without ever keying.

When in doubt, monitor.

Secrets¶

Node secrets and portal passwords are connect/init arguments only. They are never stored on a station, never present in snapshots, events or errors, and never written to a log. Keep it that way on your side too: no passwords in config files you commit, in bug reports, or in screenshots.