[drats_users] D-Rats Using The DV-Dongle

[Dan Smith]

> We are 
> having a lot of fun with D-Rats but it's kind of frustrating when a 
> message is being sent and you can't copy the text.  Some people think 
> you are ignoring them because you don't reply back to what they say :-)

Let me ask you this: can you confirm that the dongle users see broken
chats from an RF user and other RF users see it clean?

RF is, well, RF and thus is susceptible to interference and packet loss.
 The chat packets have always been "best effort" because you can't
reliably multicast to an unknown number of people.  If the same packet
is seen broken by other RF users, then the problem is the path from the
RF sender to the repeater.  Not much you can do about that.

> That's a good point about complex things working and simple things like 
> chat don't.  As a test we had a person send email to my station that was 
> on RF and he was using a Dongle.  The message was sent ok and my station 
> transferred the email back out to the internet.  That's a great feature 
> and we are thinking of leaving one machine set up like that as a mail 
> server.  Well, after he sent that email he sent a chat about it which 
> was broken and no one was able to hear about his success. 

See, that is very interesting because it means that things are working
at least a little bit.  The message transfer, unlike chat, will
guarantee delivery of all the bits of the message by retrying any
packets that fail to go through.  However, it won't keep trying forever.
 Since it goes through, I'd say it's working pretty well, which makes me
even more curious about whether the broken chat messages you're seeing
are actually received broken...

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