[Xastir] My wish list

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 4 Feb 2010, Mike L wrote:

> 1) In audio alarms, I would like to be able to setup a movement alarm for at
> least 5 callsign-ssid. This is a great option in UI-view to let you know
> when a mobile station is back on the air.
>
> 2) digipeated audio alert to let you know when your station has been
> digipeated.
>
> 3) The ability to track more than one station at a time.
>
> 4) Igate status message sent if the gate goes up or down.

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The standard place to add wish-list items is the
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xastir feature request tracker.
There are a lot of items already listed there so make sure your
items are not duplicated before adding new ones.

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That said, I don't know if anyone is looking at those items
currently.  We've been fixing a few bugs over the last year and
adding a few very minor features.  Mostly some of us have been
looking ahead to a complete Xastir redesign.  Not that we're getting
much done on that front yet, but the plan and the hope is still
there that we will get the ball rolling soon.

There's perhaps some interest at a college in taking on some of this
task.  We're waiting to see right now.

We probably have enough talent on this and the xastir-devel list to
get something going, but I'm not sure whether the list of 15
developers all have the needed skills...  I think some will have to
come from the userbase so perhaps we'll pick up some more developers
on the way.

I personally started down the path of trying to segregate the
database/interface code into a daemon twice now, and got busy doing
other things each time so I didn't make much progress.
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Next set of topics.

1) The movement alarms.  I don't know how to do that with the
current code.  You can set up a radius and have it alarm you when
something comes within, but you can't do it per callsign.a

2) Digipeated...  We have code now that does this on the status bar
I think so it shouldn't be hard to tie that into the audio alerts.
I guess it would be useful while driving but not a lot of people
drive with an Xastir laptop.

3) Tracking more than one station:  You can set up one Xastir in the
normal way, then turn on the server ports.  Start up additional
Xastir's using the "-c path/file" command-line switch and attach
them to "localhost:2023" which is the 1st Xastir's server port.
Then you can track one station on each Xastir.  I know this is a
pain, but it's one way to do it with the existing code.

4) Igate status message:  I haven't seen a need a for that, as I
connect to a reliable server.  I assume you're talking about an
internet server rather than an RF igate?  Xastir does have code to
retry a downed server periodically and will recover, if you have
that option set on the interface.  You can also connect to the DNS
round-robin server, something like "rotate.aprs.net"???  I don't
recall exactly, but when one goes down, Xastir will retry and get to
usually a different one that works.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.                         <http://www.eskimo.com/~archer>
    APRS:  Where it's at!                    <http://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!"