[Xastir] Any ideas for Xastir

[Curt, WE7U]

On Sat, 19 May 2018, MLHPUB wrote:

> May I suggest 3 ideas for Xastir after few years of use ?
>
> 1- Queries
> It should be great if Xastir could answer APRS queries (?aprsh or ?aprsd for 
> instance, and others). These are really usefull to test stations capabilities 
> especially on HF (or other bands of course) when propgation is good !

Some queries are implemented in src/db.c:process_directed_query() and process_query(). Others could be implemented there fairly easily if someone had the time/desire to do so. I don't have the time right now but perhaps someone else will pick this up.


> 2- Message timer
> Other stations, digi or igate, are sometimes slow to react facing Xastir 
> which retry a message quickly after the first sent. I noticed this 
> "aggressive" behavior especially with slow links (300bds HF).
> Can we imagine an adjustable timer for this parameter ?
> Because it looks progressive when retries are growing (APRS specs ?), 3 steps 
> could be possible :
> - quite
> - normal
> - aggressive

As I recall Xastir does an exponential backoff on message ack's up to a max delay. The initial delay is optimized for 1200-baud simplex links but it quickly backs off: There shouldn't be many transmissions before it backs off sufficiently for any link speed.

I'm not sure another scheme is warranted here but that initial delay could perhaps be made changeable. It would require several files to be changed including the GUI.


> 3- Data and messages views
> Data view and messages view are really usefull to monitor trafic but I think 
> date and time informations are missing.
> How about add this in a short field for each line on these monitor windows ?

Seems reasonable as long as the windows don't get extended horizontally much. Alternately could throw timestamps in on another line above them and not extend the window.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.        http://we7u.wetnet.net
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