- What's this?
The PropagationMonitor module scans for e-mails from vhfdx.net once every
minute. If a mail is found it is parsed and announced on the air.

This module is a bit tricky to setup since a lot of mail routing magic
have to work. Less experienced Linux users may get into trouble.
You have been warned...

- Setup a mail account
You need to email the propagation alerts somewhere. The best is if you can
setup for the emails to be directly delivered to the SvxLink computer.
How to do that is out of scope for this document.

An easier way is to register for a free account somewhere where POP can be
used to fetch incoming emails. Then use fetchmail on your SvxLink computer
to actually fetch them. For example, call it from a cron job.

- Setup Procmail
Each received email must be stored in a separate file for the propagation
monitor to be able to read it. This is what Procmail do. Procmail is
configured using the ".procmailrc" file in the home directory of the user
that is receiving the mail. A preconfigured config file is in the SvxLink
distribution.

- SELinux issues
As usual there are SELinux issues. If you are sure SELinux is turned off on your
system you can skip this step but if you ever consider turning it on you should
do this because otherwise you will get into trouble in the future.

To enable Procmail to write to the spool directory we need to run a couple of
commands as user root.

semanage fcontext -a -t user_home_t "/var/spool/svxlink/propagation_monitor(/.*)?"
restorecon -r /var/spool/svxlink/propagation_monitor

This was tested on CentOS 5.

- Register with VHFDX
Register yourself on the VHFDX (www.vhfdx.info) site so that emails start
coming. On the site you enter your geographic position and setup what type of
propagation alerts you want to receive. Start by allowing alerts for lower
bands like 6m and 10m to test the system. You can disable them later
when you know it's working.

