On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 10:11:50PM +0100, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <[email protected]> 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 echo "prpv_a'rfg_cnf_har_cvcr" | sed -e 's/_/ /g' | tr [a-m][n-z] [n-z][a-m] _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
