[Xastir] Suggestion

[Chip G.]

I've long had an interest in a certain feature for Xastir. Then I noticed that aprs.fi had the feature. So I started thinking about it and how it might be implemented. Now my programming skills are too rusty/weak to do the coding myself, but I have some ideas that make me think it ought to be relatively straight forward to implement.

What I am interested in seeing is a feature to track more than one station (at least two, more might be possible but does increase the complexity). In some ways it is very similar to redrawing the screen by using the mouse. The user clicks on location on the screen, drags the mouse, then releases. The program uses the two points (click & release) to determine the map zoom. If tracking two stations then you can use the same strategy (but one would likely want to zoom a little wider than that so that one isn't constantly zooming). If you have three points (stations) then you would create two points by combining the furthest west with the furthest north and then the furthest east with the furthest south (and add a little bit).

There are some questions that would need to be addressed as well:
• What do you do if one of the stations becomes inactive?
	- Continue to use the old location?
	- Switch to the track the remaining station(s) until the inactive station reappears?
• What do you do if the stations are very close to each other?
	- Add a preference for maximum zoom?
	- Continue to use the same strategy regardless?


Why is this feature worthwhile? My personal reason is to be able to track both my wife and myself on a single screen. This would display on my RPi in the kitchen. This is easier than teaching her how to change from tracking her to tracking me. But this feature would also be useful in a public service or emergency situation. Imagine being able to enter multiple SAGs, trackers, or deployed stations. The screen would automagically adapt to show all applicable stations. Why not just use aprs.fi if it has the feature? (1) It doesn't have messaging abilities. (2) It isn't working reliably on my RPi. (3) Xastir has a more feature rich set.

Implementation thoughts:
 -- Basic: use existing dialog, parse the comma separated list
 -- Advanced: add a menu choice and dialog for tracking preferences, add a preference for max zoom in, add a preference for max zoom out (if all can't be fit on the screen it would focus on the first listed station), add a preference for percentage of zoom margin when fitting all stations, add a dialog with separate boxes for each station to be tracked


I wonder if any of the more skilled programmers would help me champion this feature. Thanks.



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    Chip