[Xastir] Newbee question re: Garmin Rino / Cygwin / Xastir and SAR

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Jim Tolbert wrote:

> I have a 3 year old laptop (Windows XP) that I could dedicate to
> this.  I have to wipe the disk anyway.  What Linux do I want? Do I
> reformat the disk before installing Linux?  What do I do about
> various device drivers?

You'll get various votes on the different Linuxes.  I personally use
OpenSuSE, and develop/use Xastir with it.  Other developers and
users have differing opinions.  One of our developers is running
FreeBSD.

When installing most Linux distributions they'll give you the option
to take over the whole disk or install in a dual-boot configuration.
If you don't want XP on there, Linux will happily take over and
repartition for it's own use.


> Another stupid question,......  What does the automatic polling of the
> field GPS units  -- Xastir or the "Digipeater" (I obviously don't know
> what this is <grin>)?

In this case it's Xastir telling the attached Rino to poll the
others.  Xastir has a timing slider for determining the interval at
which to poll.  Every time a Rino hears a poll packet it should
respond with it's position, at which point any Rino that is within
simplex range and hears it will update the position and show it on
it's GPS map screen.

Normally you only see the position when the Rino user manually
presses his "send my position" button or whatever it is called.
You can request the position of friends of yours, but I think you
need to know part or all of their ID in order to do this.  Can't
remember the details, but with the Xastir setup you have to have
"APRS" as the prefix for each callsign, then each device out there
that matches will respond.

A digipeater is a digital repeater.  On APRS we use them on
mountaintops/hilltops/buildings to extend the range greatly for
mobiles/portables as they run around.  We use a "flooding" protocol
in the U.S. and Canada where the packet gets sent out along the
digipeaters in all directions at once up to two or three hops.  This
gives us a few hundred mile range here in the western U.S.  RINO's
can't do this.  You have to use Amateur Radio APRS plus have an
amateur radio license to do it.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
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