[Xastir] Need ideas for messaging changes

[James Ewen]

>     n7jgx,wide3-3
>     wide,wide2-2
>     relay,wide3-3
> 
> If n7jgx goes off the air, paths 2/3 might still work.
> 
> If I can't make it to a wide directly, paths 1/2 will work.
> 
> If all home stations near me get knocked off the air (think 
> power-outage), path #2 will still get me out.

Actually, paths 2 and 3 should get you out if all home stations get knocked
off the air. All digipeaters should respond to RELAY as well as the rest of
the usual WIDE digipeater aliases.

Under normal conditions, you should get out 4 hops via path 1 and 3, and 3
hops via path 2. However path 3 can actually reach one digipeater further
than the other two, since the RELAY alias can be acted upon by the first
WIDE digipeater.

Anyway, back to the task at hand.

You could use the multiple path settings to tailor your APRS network load.
By setting one path short, another medium, and the third long. By rotating
through them, locals will see your beacons on every transmission, further
away, they see only 2 out of 3, and at the furthest extreme, only 1 out of 3
position reports are seen. This follows the basic concept of APRS, the
further away the station, the less important it is to the local user.

However, if the paths are setup this way, trying to send ACKs via these
paths to a station at a distance equal to the long path means that only
every third ACK will make it to its destination.

If the messaging section has it's own path, then ACKs need to use that path
as well. It would be good to have any pending messages cancelled and
reissued if the user changes the messaging path.

I think your idea of showing the suggested return path is great. It's
difficult to determine the proper return path automatically. There are so
many digipeaters that are not set up properly, it can make for some nasty
paths. Also, with the ability to set multiple paths in Xastir, you can not
determine what the user has in mind when setting those paths up. If the user
is sitting at the machine sending messages, you should be able to assume
that they would be watching the screen. You just need to make sure the user
knows that there is a separate unproto path for messaging that needs to be
set.

James
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