Serial KISS TNC interface

KISS stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid" and is by far the most common sort of TNC now being sold.

Important

Use this interface if you have a KISS TNC. Don't use the other "Serial" TNC interface types for KISS TNCs. They won't work.

Activate on Startup?
Allow Transmitting?
Digipeat: Allow this interface to serve as a digipeater. Xastir is not full-featured digipeater software and you should probably not enable this.
TNC Port: The serial port your TNC is connected to.
Port settings: The baud rate of the TNC serial port
IGate options: Whether or not to gate traffic and in which direction.
Unproto paths: Digipeater paths to use. WIDE2-2 is safe unless you know what you are doing.
KISS Parameters: Transmit delay, persistence, slot time, and Transmit tail. You should probably leave these at defaults unless you know the KISS protocol well. Setting them wrong can mess up how you use the APRS channel or how well other stations can decode your packets.
Full Duplex: Most TNCs can't do full duplex. Enable this if yours can.
Init KISS-mode on startup: You should probably never enable this. According to our old documentation, which is hard to locate, this feature was put in specifically at the request of one user who had a TNC (a "tnc2multi") that needed a special string to be sent to it to put it into KISS mode. That string is hard coded into Xastir, and probably only applies to that one type of TNC device. Leave this alone.

Note

Some soundcard TNC software can provide an interface that masquerades as a serial port and provides KISS data. You can use this interface type for those.

Direwolf, however, recommends not doing that for various reasons, and recommends using its AGWPE interface instead.

Using TCP/IP KISS TNCs

Xastir has no native support for KISS TNCs that work only over a TCP/IP port. However, there is a workaround to make such a device appear to Xastir as a serial port and to use that port with a serial kiss TNC interface described here.

See TCP IP TNC for details.