[Xastir] Digipeating

[hasan schiers]

OK...I'm taking the plunge or "hedge" as I would call it. I have a spare 400
mhz celeron with 256 mb RAM, so I ordered a set of Debian 3.0 that
supposedly has Xastir in it. I'm going to begin playing with Xastir to get a
feel for what it does and how well it does it.

I went to the Xastir web site and began reading, and ran across something
that I may have misinterpreted. In a reference to digi-peating, it seemed to
be saying that Xastir doesn't do any internally (unlike UI-View32 which has
a smart digipeater function built in), and commented that the digipeating
was done in the TNC. Eeeuuchh! That is not an acceptable solution for me. No
tnc hardware does a good job of smart digipeating, and besides that, I'm not
interested in buying new TNCs.

Then there was a second comment that digi-NED could be used. My questions:

1. Will Xastir and digi-NED run side-by side on the same machine? How does
Xastir interface to digi-NED, or does it not do that? I am so used to having
a configurable smart digi integrated into the aprs client, that I'm having
trouble imagining how to accomplish the same thing with two different
clients. (port contention issues)

2. A local station told me that Xastir could interface nicely with AGWPE on
a Windows system. How is that accomplished?

3. Will Xastir ever (I know...that's a long time) be able to support
Precision Mapping? The Xastir users I have chatted with seem to think that
PM is superior to any mapping available to Xastir at the present.

I want to keep my ui-view32 system running, (on a different machine on my
network) but wish to experiment with Xastir on its own dedicated Debian
machine, on this same network. I'm thinking in the long term, Xastir has a
strong potential for continuing development, while UI-View, due to Roger's
unfortunate health situation, may not.

Thanks for any help ...it's going to be a steep learning curve.

73,

hasan, N0AN