direwolf VS Reticulum

144.800 is the APRS frequency in Europe. That's part of the 2m amateur band, and you can use tools like Direwolf to decode the packets. See https://aprs.fi/ for a display of the packets that make it to the internet.

Yes, recommended. https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf

Since you're trying to save money, I'll second the direwolf software TNC. There's packet-radio.net with info about setting up direwolf.

By default it should be printing any successfully decoded packets to the terminal window. Did you follow https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf/blob/master/doc/Raspberry-Pi-SDR-IGate.pdf or similar?

I use Direwolf with a Pi Zero and I believe there is a way to get the packet data out or passed to a script. I was going to look into this myself as some point as I wanted to just have a small screen on the Pi just to see traffic passing though my iGate on occasion.

Hardware TNC's were a thing in the 90s but nowadays software TNC'S such as Direwolf are far more efficient

On this topic, has anyone here used direwolf (https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf) to communicate between two computers without radios?

Wheel successfully reinvented :)

Nothing stopping you setting up a whole AX.25 network between multiple machines using Dire Wolf [1] and the built-in AX.25 [2] (a derivation of X.25) support still in the Linux kernel. You get a proper network interface that shows up alongside eth0. Nice short instructions at [3]. Just don't hook it up to radios unless you're appropriately licensed. Speakers and mics only.

[1] https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX.25

[3] https://g7vrd.co.uk/ax25-direwolf-linux

https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf has the current and best instructions.

Any views/comparison reagarding freakwan versus reticulum https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum ?

Reticulum