[Xastir] Bulletin msg to RF

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 10:11:50PM +0100, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <div.tt14 at ebnett.no> flavor, containing:
> Hi, is it possible to get Xastir to send BLN and other local group 
> messages to RF.

No, and yes, sorta, depending on how willing you are to accept half measures.

Xastir has no gui for creation of bulletins and announcements, only regular
APRS station-to-station messages.  So the official answer should be, "No,
you can't send bulletins and announcements from Xastir."

That said, however, bulletins and announcements are sent using the APRS
message format, with a tocall of BLNx where x is a number (bulletin) or
letter (announcement), and without a sequence number.

You *CAN* therefore kludge sorta-functional bulletin messages out of Xastir, but
it won't be able to keep retransmitting them on a user-configurable schedule 
like the spec says they should be retransmitted, and they won't be strictly 
correct because they'll have a sequence number.   Just use the normal 
outgoing message feature to send a message to, say BLN0, and then be sure to 
cancel outgoing messages after a few transmissions, because Xastir will be 
waiting for the ACK (which will never come, and for which it wouldn't wait if 
someone would implement a proper bulletin gui that sent messages on a schedule 
with no sequence number instead).  There may be some devices and programs that
will refuse to recognize them as bulletins due to the presence of sequence
numbers, but I haven't found one yet.

Even though Xastir can be forced to fake it, on the rare occasions when I need 
to send bulletins I do so using the linux "beacon" command to my ax.25 port 
instead.  You can set "beacon" to send at fixed intervals, or only once --- 
the latter could be done in a script to send at odd intervals instead.

There is a gui for group messages that one might think could be used, but
I'm not sure how well tested it is or how completely implemented.  I seem to
recall that there were limitations on it.  Curt will have to comment on that.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
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