[Xastir] Feature bloat?

[Henk de Groot]

At 14:31 17-6-03 -0700, Curt Mills, WE7U wrote:
>On Sun, 15 Jun 2003, Steve Dimse wrote:
>
> > That's not the point, doesn't matter if you have a hundred digis and a home
> > reception range of one mile. If a home station hears a packet, and no 
> one else
> > does, why not digi it? Think of it as a smart RELAY...
>
>Understand.

For this to work the station needs to know that the packet it hears is an 
original packet and not one that was already digipeated. Detection if a 
packet was digipeated already is not trivial, if you want it just steal the 
logic from DIGI_NED (file mac_if.c). Xastir already has a detection for 
"Direct" stations, but it doesn't recognise digipeating on desitination 
SSID and it explicitly checks for WIDE and TRACE so it fails on BeaconNet's 
HOPn-N digipeating for example. That has to be added to be complete.

You can program a hold-off of 1 second to keep watching if others caught 
the packet and digipeated it. But that won't do if more users are using 
Xastir - they all wait the same 1 second and still cause a mess. So you 
need to add some extra random time to avoid this (more or less at least...).

Speaking of digipeating on destination SSID, is not impossible to use 
digipeating on destination SSID in Xastir today, maybe something to add to 
the interface configuration screens? The only way I curently see how it 
should be done is leave the paths empty and make an ALTNET call "APX120-4" 
for a 4 hop SSID digipeat counter. This doesn't work however since when all 
the paths are empty Xastir assumes WIDE,WIDE2-2 all by itself. Also on a 
propper implementation of ALTNET you would miss all the other stations that 
do not match with the "APX120" ALTNET.

The TH-D7 Kenwood method is just to fill the path with a single number 
instread of a complete call, maybe that can be addopted? It doesn't work 
like that in Xastir today, I just tried that!

Kind regards,

Henk.