[Xastir] Digipeating

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004, hasan schiers wrote:

> 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.

Any distribution will have an older version of Xastir.  Keep
updating Xastir on a regular basis and you'll be happy.


> 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)

The Unix model is significantly different than the Windows model.
Unix tends to use small specialized tools hooked together with other
tools (usually through pipes) to accomplish a function.  Windows
tends to use large monolithic do-everything applications.

I brought up the idea of adding smart digipeating into Xastir and
was (rightly) shot down.  The correct way to accomplish this is to
use a specialized tool that is designed for the job, like digi_ned.



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

You do a socket connection to the AGWPE instance, whether it's on
the same machine that Xastir is running on, the next machine on your
home ethernet or wireless, or a machine halfway across the world.
Windows machines can also connect to local or remote AGWPE
instances, so it's no different than that.


> 3. Will Xastir ever (I know...that's a long time) be able to support
> Precision Mapping?

No.  Nor should we.


> The Xastir users I have chatted with seem to think that
> PM is superior to any mapping available to Xastir at the present.

Talk to different Xastir users.  Also define "superior".  We have
free street map data which is newer than PM's map data.

--
Curt, WE7U			         http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"