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

[Dan Smith]

> 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!)

Well, it could be that their UNIX device names are of a different
pattern than those that D-RATS knows about.  If you tell me the
/dev/FOO name of your device, I can add it to the pattern it
recognizes.  You can also, of course, just plug that into the serial
port field itself.

> 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.

I can't think of *any* reason for that, and certainly haven't noticed
it myself.  Has anyone else experienced such behavior?

> (Something to do with how my Iogear GUC232A serial/USB dongle
> handles flow control with the ID-800H?)

D-RATS has to do the flow control itself because of the way USB
drivers are designed for large buffers of data.  So, the flow control
should be turned off (automatically by D-RATS) on your adapter.
However, I wouldn't rule out it being adapter-related.

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

I'm not seeing any lockups on the latest of either version and haven't
heard reports of such.  If you get a lockup that causes you to have to
kill D-RATS, *please* fetch the debug log before restarting it and
file a bug with it attached.  Instructions for that here:

http://www.d-rats.com/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#head-6a3e7aec42b42194d76973b4cead403cf9bbf5cc

> Lots of nice comments on the new UI.

Cool :)
 
> 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?

Think of it like an FTP program.  Local on the left, remote on the
right.  Type the callsign into the big box at the top right and hit
the up arrow from the local side.  If you want to see the remote's
files too, hit the connect button first and you can then use either
the up or down arrows to pull/push files across.

> 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.

Excellent.

> 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...)

Turn off reception of raw text and you won't see that.  You can also
create a chat filter for CQCQCQ or "[EOB]" to keep that out of view.

> 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.

Man, that's really concerning because many of the things that makes
windows unhappy have been redesigned in 0.3 to make it safer.  Please
reproduce it and see if we can find any useful information in the
debug log.

Thanks Nate!

-- 
Dan Smith
dsmith#danplanet.com, s/#/@/
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS