[Xastir] Directed Station Query for Position?

[William McKeehan]

Thanks for the response Tom.

Too bad I can't get his station to respond along the same path that he got my
message.

I would like to see queries supported in Xastir, but I'd rather have a
mechanism to send bulletins or an improved interface to the
Stations/Messages/Bulletins lists or ... pick any other feature in the request
list :-)

I can deal with the query not being available.


On Tue, May 10, 2005 4:02 pm, Tom Russo said:
> On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 03:39:53PM -0400, we recorded a bogon-computron
> collision of the <mckeehan at mckeehan.homeip.net> flavor, containing:
>> It is my understanding that the General Stations Query asks all stations to
>> respond by sending their position and status.
>>
>> I'm looking to get a station to respond to me with his position using the
>> same
>> path to get back to me that I took to get to him; his normal path will not
>> get
>> back to me.
>
> Try sending "?APRSP" as a message to the station.  Be prepared to cancel
> pending messages, though.  Xastir does not implement general queries other
> than the ones you can get to from the menus or the station info dialog (i.e.
> the "general stations" "Igates" and "wx stations" queries for all stations,
> and the "direct stations" "trace" and "unacked message" queries you can get to
> from Station Info) --- using the message dialog to send queries works, but
> xastir treats them as regular messages: if you attempt to send "?APRSP" xastir
> will keep sending until it gets an ack, and no ack will ever come.
>
> I just tried this --- I sent an "?APRSP" to the D700 in my truck from my
> APRS-IS-only office machine, and it responded with a posit immediately.  Watch
> for the incoming posit, kill the outgoing message when it comes in so you
> don't
> flood your local net with the query.  AFAICT, though, the returned posit used
> the packet path my D700 normally uses, not a reverse path through the igate
> and to me via APRS-IS as you hope it would be.
>
> Ideally there would be a way to send specific types of queries outside of the
> message dialog --- queries are not supposed to have message-IDs and are
> not supposed to be retransmitted the way messages will be if unacked.
> I once thought it might be simple to hack on the message dialog handling
> so that if the message was one of the queries in the APRS spec then it would
> send it with no message ID and not queue it for retransmission.  Another
> option might be to have a query dialog that sends any of the queries in the
> spec with a click of a button to any specified station.
>
>> On Tue, May 10, 2005 3:18 pm, Jason Winningham said:
>> >
>> > On May 10, 2005, at 2:15 PM, William McKeehan wrote:
>> >
>> >> I know there is a station on RF not too far from me. His packets do
>> >> not make
>> >> it to an IGate, and they are not being digied by any of the digi's
>> >> that I can
>> >> hear.
>> >>
>> >> Is there a way in Xastir to send a query packet to that station and
>> >> have it
>> >> return it's location to me via RF?
>> >
>> > Is that what message -> general stations query is about?  I think it
>> > is...
>
> I think "general stations query" is a broadcast "is there anybody out there?"
> query, and is intended to cause all stations that hear it respond with a
> posit.
> AFAICT, few  clients actually implement this --- or at least none
> in my area do, and Xastir doesn't respond to it (though it will send one).
> That's probably a good thing, as this is an easy way to flood an area with
> tons of extra packets.
>
> --
> Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
> Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1
>  "The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly
>   worth the effort." -- Norton Juster
>
>


-- 
William McKeehan
KI4HDU
Internet: mckeehan at mckeehan.homeip.net
http://mckeehan.homeip.net