[aprssig] Sending bulletins from Xastir?

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:36:07AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <dick at kb7zva.com> flavor, containing:
> >Is there a way to send bulletins from Xastir? 
> 
> Try sending a message TO: BNL1
> 
> If you have the capability of sending messages, you can send
> bulletins. BNL1, BLN2, BLN3 if you want to increment the bulletins
> in order.
> 
> Try it.

It sorta, kinda, partly works.

If you use the "Open group message" capability and use the BLNx to-call it'll
get sent out and xastir will even recognize it when it hears it, displaying
the bulletin in the bulletin dialog.

It will, however, also put a sequence number on the packet, and appears to
wait for ACKs, which is not the desired behavior.

Also, if you use the normal station-to-station dialog to send it, it'll go out
over the air with a decaying algorithm, but for some reason xastir doesn't
recognize it on receipt as a bulletin.  It'll also definitely wait for the
message to be acked, which again is wrong behavior.

So in a pinch, one could send a bulletin out if one needed to, but the 
proper implementation of the feature requires a little more than that.
So far, nobody with the ability to code in xastir has cared about it enough
to do the job, or at least has not cared about it enough during the brief
periods when they had time to do coding in xastir.  It would be nice to have 
it done right.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "It's so simple to be wise: just think of something stupid to say and
  then don't say it."  --- Sam Levinson