[Xastir] Xastir on multibands

[Curt Mills, WE7U]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Bill Vodall - WA7NWP wrote:

> Will Xastir function as a multiband gateway?
> 
> Assume a Linux box has two AX25 ports.  One on 144.39 and the other, for example,
> on 145.01.   If a station on 145.01 sends a message for a station that Xastir has heard
> on the 144.39 channel, will Xastir forward the message on RF.
> 
> This is RF to RF instead of Internet to RF.
> 
> If it does, this could open up some new frequencies for APRS.

I can see uses for this for satellite gateways (but might want to
limit the direction of the gatewaying through Xastir), and perhaps
for alternate frequencies as discussed where people could hang out
on a quieter frequency (or higher speed!) but still get messages
through.

I think this would be relatively easy to implement, but I don't think
Xastir has this capability now.

What I'm most interested in is getting a discussion going as to what
sorts of controls we might need in order to do this properly.  We
might need some sort of switchboard where we could define which
connections were allowed, and in what direction?  Any ideas on this
to keep it simple?  Would we want to gateway more than just messages
through?  If so, how to implement/control this?

Note that Xastir could also quite easily handle more than ten
interfaces.  Ten is the default in the code but I think it's defined
by a constant that can be easily changed.

Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.