[drats_users] Possible Who Is Online feature request

[Nate Duehr]

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:26:25 -0700, "Dan Smith" <dsmith at danplanet.com>
said:

> I think that this would quickly turn into a storm, which would be
> *really* unappreciated by voice users.  If you have ten stations on
> frequency, then you'd have something like 20-30 individual
> transmissions (assuming that a decent number of the original 10
> replies step on each other).  If you're unlucky, even a retry number
> of 3 would make that pretty heavy.  Imagine if someone did that on a
> reflector?  It'd be bad enough if they did a regular ping with what we
> have now on a reflector.

I agree.  Bad idea.  Wasn't thinking about lots of stations.

> Another thing to remember is that I can't reliably tell when the
> transmitter is keyed, and I can't flush the radio's buffer.

I hear ya.  Bummer, huh?

> So, imagine that someone sends a CQ ping, and then someone starts a
> 2-minute-long voice transmission.  Stations B and C in the above
> example send their reply, say, three times all of which is queued.
> Then, when the person speaking shuts up, everyone keys immediately and
> we get a huge burst of garble and nothing makes it through.

LOL!  Yeah.

> In response to a recent suggestion, I'm working on a connectivity test
> function, which is similar to ping, but tries with increasing packet
> sizes (in both directions) and marches upwards only if the remote
> station is successfully replying to the pings.  This sort of situation
> doesn't bother me because it's not something that could trigger a huge
> storm if you show up on frequency not knowing that there are 20
> stations online.

I was watching that with interest, but I'd be more interested not in
something that changes packet size, but that shows an "instantaneous"
view of error rate.  

The problem (usually) is not that larger packets get into trouble (I
don't think), usually the stations are fixed (around here anyway) and
they simply aren't solid enough "data copy" into the repeater to
reliably do D-RATS.  Usually if you're "in" the repeater, you're "in"
and you can send short or long packets as you see fit, from what I'm
seeing here.

Users often don't "believe" those of us who are solid into the repeater
that this is their problem ("But I can talk just fine!")... you know the
drill.  

What would be useful would be a way to send a known bit-pattern in small
packets continuously (like loopback tests in telco?) to a strong station
and have that station tell you over a period of a minute or so (wouldn't
want to do this very often... very annoying!) when you're setting up a
portable station or whatever, if your signal is "good enough" to even do
D-RATS in the first place.

Even cooler... would be to teach the Gateway to do it... but that'd
probably require some fancy coding by Robin, or at least assistance from
him in using his sniffer to drive an application that could reply
on-channel.  Maybe I could figure out some way to hack something
together using the sniffer and the voice announcements... hmm... doesn't
sound particularly easy... "Error rate, 0 percent", etc.  That's
probably "overkill" though.  Another participating D-RATS station could
do it.

Another thing to think about for much later down the road... for
simplex... a way to "designate" a path... Station A knows they can reach
WY0X, and they know Station B can also... but that's starting to sound
like Packet AX.25 routing.  (GRIN!)

Nate WY0X
--
  Nate Duehr
  nate at natetech.com