[Xastir] Xastir control API?

[David A. Ranch]

Hello Xastir users,

I normally leave my sole home radio running packet on 145.050 here in 
Northern California but it would be nice to get back to APRS. Now that 
Hamlib has Kenwood D710 support (minimal but it does work), I'm looking 
to expand what I can do. What I'm thinking is setting up sort of time 
sharing system where I can QSY the radio and then inform the various 
software systems to go do their thing.

   Question:  Is there a way to send a signal to Xastir from an external 
shell script, whatever to tell it to send an APRS beacon?

If I had that, I could setup say a cron job every half an hour to QSY 
the radio, send a beacon, listen for a while, and then QSY back to 145.050.


Thoughts?   And yes, I realize I could do this just with the Linux 
"beacon" command to send an APRS formatted UI string but it would be 
nice to have Xastir running more often.

--David