Tuesday, August 7, 2012

DIXPRS Test Drive


I turned on DIXPRS this morning.    The hardest part was getting the KPC3 TNC out of whatever mode UI-VIew had left it in and responding in the basic KISS that DISPRS expected...   Beyond that it was a simple matter of downloading the .zip archive, editing config-kiss.txt and saving it in DOS format as config.txt and then running the executable.

DIXPRS home page:  https://sites.google.com/site/dixprs/

* It defaults to digipeating WIDE2 and WIDE1 - I had to drop that down to just WIDE1 as my goal is a fill in digi -  we have too many HIGH WIDE's the way it is now but that's another post...

* There is no 'viscous' digipeating..

* The digipeated packet callsign substitution doesn't include the used path element.   For example, "WIDE1-1" becomes "WA7NWP-11*", not "WA7NWP-11*,WIDE1*".   This is a good thing.  James will disagree but I still believe even stronger then ever that all those 'used' elements are just massive clutter in the packet histories.

* The database feature is cool.    https://sites.google.com/site/dixprs/monitoring

This is similar to what I'm doing with P9....  That too is another post.

Bottom line - it's a cool project and I'm going to move it to one of the Linux server boxes to keep it running and gathering data.   It's not a fit as my home APRS station/server where I need viscous fill in digipeating (APRSX), smart cross band digipeating and info generation (DIGI_NED) and a shared TCP downlink port (APRSD)...     The adventure continues -- next step is to get APRSX compiling on Cygwin or MinGW so I can run it on the XP netbook.

73
Bill - WA7NWP