[Xastir] Slightly Off Topic.

[John Ronan]

Afternoon,

I spent most of yesterday evening being driven around (the bends!)  
"Stages" for a Car Rally, we were giving signal reports back to a  
station that will be a  "Repeater" site for the actual event.  It  
turns out, that we picked a good site for the repeater as it was  
accessible from pretty much all the required points via either mobile  
or handheld radio.

We could see the cars that missed 'turn's' on APRS, and were able to  
send them back ''on stage" as it were (saved a good bit of time).

Now, a question was posed to me from one of the guys.  They have  
Timing Clocks, that they use at the Start/Finish controls, the guy I  
was talking to was saying that they are RS-232 out.  Brain was doing  
a bit of ticking over (on the long straits) and seeing as they have  
RS-232 out I was wondering thinking A) it may be possible to hook it  
into APRS to "Automate" the information gathering, and B) has anyone  
done anything similar?

I'm going to get more information on the Timing Units, and I will  
also get an ASCII stream from one of them. If nothing else, its  
something 'else' to play with on APRS.

My Idea would be to maybe put a Tracker into the "00" car (last to  
run before competition cars) which Control could watch on a Screen  
with Xastir, and then maybe a server port application to receive and  
demultiplex the packets from the different start/finish stations into  
a single log (maybe CSV) file for each.

Obviously this years event is a bit too close to try anything.

Comments?

Regards
de John
EI7IG

--
John Ronan <jronan at tssg.org>, +353-51-302938
Telecommunications Software &  Systems Group,  http://www.tssg.org