[amsat-bb] How to digipeat?

[Hans BX2ABT]

Hello all,

Apparently my mail about BugSat-1 raised some interest into that bird's 
digipeater. But that still leaves me with the following question (and I 
hope I don't sound too obtuse): how do you digipeat? I've tried to 
understand it by googling it over the past year or so, but I still don't 
get it much. Most tutorials explain about setting it up, but with HTs. I 
am running a home station only, with the rig connected to a PC. From 
what I understand you need to use the program UISS then.

I got as far as this: I installed UISS (under Wine) and got it connected 
to Direwolf. Right now I can work the Falconsat-3 BBS using PacSat 
Ground Station and while running that program I see the same messages 
that Direwolf displays also appearing in UISS. So far, so good, but then 
what? I press either F5, F6, or F7, but nothing happens. Yes, my rig 
burps out some data for a split second, but I can't find myself back on 
APRS.fi. So what am I doing wrong? Any parameters to adjust? Or are 
digipeats not stored for the next iGate to put it on the internet?

Again, I hope I don't sound too witless, but I've never really 
understood APRS, apart from terrestrial position reporting and even that 
was kind of hard with all the paths and whatnot. Hope you nice people on 
this list can drop some pointers. 73 de Hans

P.S. I've got some nasty local interference on 145.825 MHz and that 
makes receiving the ISS and other birds almost impossible. I was lucky 
to get two frames in from IO-86 the other day, because that was due 
south, with the QRM coming from the north-east. Getting a signal up 
shouldn't be much of a problem, though.