[Xastir] Festival proximity question.

[Kurt Savegnago]

--- On Wed, 11/3/10, Jason KG4WSV <kg4wsv at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Jason KG4WSV <kg4wsv at gmail.com>
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Kurt
> Savegnago <ksaves2 at sbcglobal.net>
> wrote:

> > I track amateur rockets and it would be nice to hear
> the distance and bearing audibly so one could know where to
> look to try to pick up the descending rocket and to perhaps
> visually see a deployment event.
> 
> How often do you beacon?
> 
> I have a radioshield on an arduino in a rocket, and I TX
> once a
> second.  I wonder how xastir+festival would behave in
> such conditions?
> 
> >and it would be nice to hear the distance and bearing
> audibly so one could know where to look to try to pick up
> the descending rocket and to perhaps visually see a
> deployment event.
> 
> Elevation would be nice, too, for rockets and
> balloons.  Not sure
> that's reasonable for standard xastir users, but it would
> sure be
> handy for me on occasion.
> 
> -Jason
> kg4wsv

 On boost under G, I sometimes don't get a lock until apogee and descent.
With a high refresh rate, the voice server gets behind.
Would be nice if it could be modified to just give a bearing and 
distance to KC9LDH-X and not keep repeating the home callsign over and over or even the target callsign over and over. As mentioned, with a high refresh rate, the voice gets behind.  One can see that on playback of a stored logfile.  Actually just saying bearing and distance
would be acceptable leaving out the station ID (This of course would be with the voice announcement not deleting the on air station ID mind you.)
The other thing folks is I at least am not using 144.390 for high reporting rate experimentation so the system won't necessarily get clogged.  Even if one were to use .390, with a low powered 300mW transmitter and WIDE2-1 or even adding NOGATE, it wouldn't disrupt things
very long as rocket flights and reocvery at the most are a few minutes.
Once lying on the ground, unless the digipeater is within a couple of miles, no one but the local tracking station will know it is there.
  Now a high altitude balloon is a different story.:-) Doing altitude
direction and speed would be really neat via voice announcement.
In that case, I probably would be monitoring the computer screen rather than looking up trying to find the balloon. :-)  My friends at NIXHAB
http://nixhab.com/ last February were tracking their balloon and stopped for a sec to plot their path.  The tracking guy said the balloon should be right above them and the guys with good eyes could see the thing and the guys with poorer eyes were able to see it with binoculars and confirm what the "eagle eyed" saw.  90k feet up! 

                               Kurt KC9LDH