[Xastir] Group Messages

[William McKeehan]

You will find that it works pretty well within a group of Xastir users. I
forget how it behaves with respect to retries and acknowledging.

I use a separate tool to create bulletins to announce the net that I run (it's
a voice net about APRS). I accept check-ins via APRS which helps people
understand how path's work and how to effectively use paths to get their
message to the intended destination.
-- 
William McKeehan
KI4HDU
http://mckeehan.homeip.net

On Tue, February 12, 2008 4:08 pm, Frank Tomesch wrote:
> Thanks for the information.  I had proposed to the local aprs users around
> here that we have a net.  One of them sugessted that we use the group
> messaging feature.  I couldn't find much information about it so I posed
> the questions to this group.  Just about all of us use Xastir and Linux so
> we really don't have to worry about UIView.
>
> ----- Frank -----
> ----- KA1GL -----
>
>
> On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, William McKeehan wrote:
>
>> I have used the capability occasionally.
>>
>> The file is looking for a group name with a possible wildcard (*) on each
>> line.
>>
>> For example, my file looks like this:
>> ETNAPRS
>> SKYMRX
>> SKYWRN
>> SPCL
>> SKY*
>> BLN*
>> NWS*
>> MRX*
>> CQ
>> ALL
>> QST
>>
>> As such, a message sent to ETNAPRS will pop-up on my display.
>>
>> I host a Sunday night APRS Net locally and we tried to use this at one
>> point,
>> but found that the way UI-View handles the messages is odd - I do not recall
>> the details - as a result, we dropped the use of it (too many UI-View users
>> in
>> the area).
>> --
>> William McKeehan
>> KI4HDU
>> http://mckeehan.homeip.net
>>
>> On Tue, February 12, 2008 3:34 pm, Curt, WE7U wrote:
>>> On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Frank Tomesch wrote:
>>>
>>>> Can anyone tell me whether 'Group Messaging' works? and/or the format of
>>>> the '.xastir/config/groups' file.
>>>
>>> Don't know.  This is a little-used feature in Xastir.
>>>
>>> Found "groups" in xa_config.c.  It using "GROUP_DATA_FILE" as the
>>> label in the config file, and "group_data_file" as the local
>>> variable inside Xastir that it keeps the filename/path in.
>>>
>>> messages.c uses "group_data_file" and then calls group_build_list()
>>>
>>> messages.c:group_build_list() reads from the file and puts the data
>>> into "group_data_list".
>>>
>>> I see we manually stuff a few things in first before reading from
>>> the file:
>>>
>>>   // Make sure we always listen for ourself, XASTIR, & our Version
>>>   // groups
>>>     xastir_snprintf(&group_data_list[0],10,"%s",my_callsign);
>>>     xastir_snprintf(&group_data_list[10],10,"XASTIR");
>>>     xastir_snprintf(&group_data_list[20],10,"%s",XASTIR_TOCALL);
>>>     group_data_count = 3;
>>>
>>> So it looks like each field has 10 characters and they're in one big
>>> string.
>>>
>>> A quick glance at the while loop which reads it in makes me think
>>> that each group name is on a separate line with a linefeed (or
>>> alternately linefeed & carriage return) at the end of each line.
>>> Actually it looks like they expect up to 9 characters and then a
>>> linefeed, which is enough for a six-character callsign, a dash, and
>>> a 2-character SSID.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Curt, WE7U: <www.eskimo.com/~archer/>     XASTIR: <www.xastir.org>
>>>   "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!
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>