[drats_users] Report on various D-RATS "stuff", including Alpha 11

[Nate Duehr]

Hi all,

The Colorado group moved our "informal Net" to Tuesday nights where more 
  of us could participate, and we had a good time playing with D-RATS.

I spent the better part of 1/2 hour messing with my MacBook, trying to 
get it to see two different USB/Serial dongles, and gave up.  Will have 
to get back to that one later.  (Would rather use the Mac!)

So, all of us started out with Windows flavors of D-RATS 2.10 (stable), 
and then switched to Alpha 11.

Here's what I personally noticed...

Going into a menu item, like the settings, while others on frequency are 
doing things, almost always guarantees a solid lockup on my WinXP 
machine.  So solidly locked that D-RATS has to be killed.  (Something to 
do with how my Iogear GUC232A serial/USB dongle handles flow control 
with the ID-800H?)

Others also reported a number of similar problems with lockups.  We were 
all probably playing with our settings.

Lots of nice comments on the new UI.

Couldn't "intuitively" figure out how to send a file to another station 
in the new UI.  What's the trick to where you put in the callsign?

Went back to "stable", and managed with default settings to transfer 
some fairly large (37 KB) files to a station who said he'd never 
successfully received a large file before.

Lots of "garbage" on the screen during the "bounceback" from the 
repeater -- the delay where you can hear your own voice coming back just 
BRIEFLY when you unkey sometimes, makes a big ol' mess in the chat 
window.  (The last few characters of your own transmissions...)

I have a feeling that's something Dan looked at in the Alpha, but since 
I couldn't keep the Alpha running for long before it would lock solid... 
not sure what to say there.

Anyway... we'll be doing this every Tuesday night at 8PM Mountain time. 
  I haven't really kept up on the Ratflector messages, but would anyone 
like to have us get a station set up and connected to the Ratflector 
during these sessions?

I know... pretty shoddy error reporting, not enough detail... I was so 
far behind getting going after 1/2 hour of messing with the Mac, that I 
didn't take very good notes.

We'll get you some more/better reports Dan, now that we've found a night 
that works better for all involved here in Denver Metro...

Nate WY0X