[Xastir] PHG or status text with weather?

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 12:37:04PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <aa9vi at yahoo.com> flavor, containing:
> Is it possible to send PHG information or status text if you are operating a weather station with Xastir?? 

No.  There's no room to put PHG or status text in the same posit as a weather 
report.

Other programs that show up on your screen as having both weather and PHG
do so by having a separate position packet transmitted in addition to the 
weather packet.  Xastir doesn't send this separate status posit, but if
a station sends one then Xastir will interpret it properly.

> If so, how do you do it?? If it isn't, which I suspect, can the authors please include some capability to do this?? 

It would not be especially difficult to make Xastir output a separate posit
with just status, PHG, etc, but at the moment it doesn't and I seem to recall
some objections in the past to putting such a feature in.  I, myself, have no
time to do it, and I think Curt is at least as busy or more busy than I, so 
I wouldn't count on seeing it from him anytime soon.

I think that if it were available as an option that defaults "off" then there
probably would be no good reason to object to it, but finding someone with the
time to hack it in is another matter.

You could always have a script that periodically injects a posit without 
weather and with PHG+status into Xastir's UDP port, and that might be a good 
work-around in the meantime.  I know that Xastir will transmit OBJECTS that it 
receives on its UDP port with the same "From" callsign as its own, but I'm not 
sure it will do so with ordinary posits.  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide
 stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork." - Edward Abbey