[Xastir] Xastir 1.5.0 general questions part 2

[Curt, WE7U]

On Mon, 16 May 2005, Tony Hunt wrote:

> Regards the message timing.. Thanks James for the explanation..
> Ive played about with it and observed exactly what your saying..
> The problem with the 7 second cycle is that many networks running
> typically UI-digis have dupe timers set perhaps at 30 seconds or
> more. They can not decern the difference between Posit and message
> frames. If the dupe timer is brought down below 7 seconds then
> alot of latent frames start reappearing and duping again on the
> net. Its not really a issue where Xastir is the problem but more
> an issue with Ui-Digis and the like. Having some control over that
> 7 second timer would be nice. I typically run 18 seconds and find
> that if the first one doesnt get the message thru then the second
> dupe checks out on the network but the third doesnt.

You're assuming digipeaters are always in the loop.  What about when
the two stations can hear each other direct?  The timing we use is
pretty much as APRSdos and APRS+SA use.  It works well in all cases
without user intervention.  There are other enhancements as well
such as the ability to reset the timer on the current message,
duplicate ack's going out, reply-ack's, etc.  They really make the
messaging fly compared to some of the other apps out there and
compared to what Xastir did before.


> A nice feature is Retry on heard. Maybee thiscould go on the wish
> list.  Retry on heard would resend a message that has previuosly
> gone into *Timeout* when Xastir hears the station concerned.

I believe that is already on the RFE list.  Very few of the APRS
applications do this.  I believe that APRSdos sends the message
forever at the slow rate until it is ack'ed or until it is manually
killed.  Xastir doesn't do that.


> The Igate to RF stuff.. How do I control what gets gated to RF ??
> If I enable it then still nothing gets gated .. There is a mention
> of being able to gate stations posits with wildcards but exactly
> how its setup I cant see.. I would imagine its in a config file of
> some sort.. It doesnt say so but I get the impression its the same
> file that is used to setup NWS gating to RF .. Is this true??

What do you want gated?  Xastir only gates messages for people who
have been heard on local RF for the last hour, unless both stations
involved in the messaging have been heard on local RF, in which case
it doesn't gate.  It doesn't gate posits for the remote station
through, only messages.

By messing with the nws-stations.txt file, you can get Xastir to
gate weather alerts or particular stations through to RF.


> The Server.. I see where this is as well.. UI-view also has a
> server option.. It puts all packets onto the local machine
> 127.0.0.1 port 1448 basically.. What does Xastir do with it ??

127.0.0.1 (localhost) port 2023.  Enable that functionality in the
"Interface" menu.  It can handle an essentially infinite number of
connections, depending on your processor speed and memory.  It
spawns a new process to handle each connection.


> The KISS options .. If I set up a KISS TNC as an interface then
> there is a button in there to enable KISS on startup .. Does this
> run a script or configurable file as a startup option ??

That is for a particular TNC used in Europe (tnc7?).  It hasn't been
generalized yet to be able to put other types of TNC's into KISS
mode.  There's a script in xastir/scripts for taking a TNC out of
KISS mode.  You should be able to write your own set of text
commands, put it in something like
/usr/local/share/xastir/config/tnc-kiss-on.txt and call that out
from your TNC interface dialog.  Perhaps you can also do that for
the kiss-off script.  Different TNC's use different commands for
these.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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