[drats_users] testing report from tonight on Beta-7
Nate Duehr
Mon May 11 21:17:48 PDT 2009
Hi Dan,
So far, testing has been fun. Myself, W0RMT, and KF0RW are playing
around tonight... and we should have hopefully a few more testers for
our regular Tuesday night Net on W0CDS Port B tomorrow night.
(By the way, if anyone would want to join us... I could ask permission
of one of the D-Plus Reflector owners for use of a sub-channel for a
mixed voice/data Net on Tuesday nights and even though it's a "Colorado
D-STAR" Net, transferring stuff through the D-Plus Reflector the other
night worked flawlessly for myself and a number of folks hanging out on
one of the quiet(er) Reflectors. Might be fun to get a D-RATS Net
going? Anyone?)
Anyway... tonight's testing has the following notes on "weird" stuff.
- Dan, did you put the "temporary fix" in both the fixed size and the
ascending size Connectivity Tests? It's acting like the ascending size
isn't fixed for the multiple rig support, but I'm not sure on that.
- KF0RW and I are able to send messages back and forth. We both
upgraded from Beta-5 to Beta-6, and then to Beta-7. W0RMT upgraded
direct from Beta-5 to Beta-7 (if that matters) and when I send messages
to him, they never show up on his Messages window, but the Event Log on
both ends says the messages were transferred successfully. Is there a
path thing of some sort going on here?
- I've noticed for a while now that if the packet for the "response"
between the "Waiting for Reply" and when a file or message transfer
starts, gets hammered... the whole thing stops with "Transfer
Interrupted"... but if packets get hammered AFTER that, the transfer
code does retries, and eventually seems to get the message or file
through. Could the initial Negotiation also try a little "harder",
maybe three times, before giving up?
- I attempted something that never has really worked all that well, and
it relates to the above request, I think. We had Bud W0RMT start a file
download from my station, and at the SAME time I tried to send a Message
to Steve KF0RW. The initial negotiation of the message transfer gave up
with "Transfer Interrupted" because the frequency was already busy with
W0RMT's station and mine going back and forth with the file transfer.
It would be nice if multiple stations could do multiple things and it
would just "take longer" but not give up... or at least not give up
quite that easily. I was eventually able to stuff the message through
with three "Send" attempts during the relatively large file transfer,
but it had to make it past "Negotiation Completed" and get the message
transfer thing going before it then has retries and other "error
correction" working for it.
- During a voice discussion the other night, someone mentioned that it
would be REALLY nice in true emergency type comms to be willing to set a
setting where EVERYTHING is heavily error-corrected, which of course
eats up bits in the already tiny 1200 bps... but we were generally
discussing the topic, "Do you want it ultra-reliable, or do you want it
fast"? We were both saying that with Icom's voice implementation so
HEAVILY error-corrected, there would be times when it would be nice to
do the same to data transfer in software. Someone could have an
extremely sucky signal, but there would be a bunch of software-driven
FEC in the low-speed data stream (making it ULTRA low speed, we
understand...) that the messages or files would eventually get through.
(How the above could work on Chat is harder, I suppose.)
- Another thought I had one night was whether or not there could be an
"ACK'ed" chat mode... I think you also had something similar to this in
Version 1 Dan... where you could set up a list of stations that MUST
receive your chat messages, and your station would keep track of who in
the "group" had ACK'ed the chat message. Maybe that's another way in
the future "wishlist" item?
Anyway... these are all just concepts, thoughts, brainstorming... not
sure what you like or don't like in these concepts Dan... just sharing
ideas and notes, so you can "mold" it into whatever you like.
Brian of "D*Chat" fame was on-air on REF014C driving home the other
night and he was joking that he should "just drop D*Chat support" since
everyone was talking about D-RATS Dan. Heh heh. He was obviously
kidding, but one comment he DID make was that he thought he should take
a look at your packet format and see if he could get D*Chat to copy
D-RATS chat packets. If you have the format documented somewhere, you
should toss him a copy of the packet format maybe... don't know how
serious he was, but interop between the "ultra-simple" chat program and
the more "advanced" D-RATS would be nifty, I suppose.
Have fun... sure looks like you're coding your brains out, perhaps as a
run up to a "Dayton Release" with new features for 2009? :-) ;-)
Nate WY0X
More information about the drats_users
mailing list