[drats_users] Email Proposal

[Nate Duehr]

Sorry, thought of one more comment that led to more thoughts about
e-mail and WinLink.  We tested just stuffing WinLink through the D-STAR
radios around here a while back.

It worked fine other than one major showstopper, just tell WinLink it's
a serial port, not a TNC.  

The showstopper was... WinLink had no idea how big the radio buffers
were, since it thought it was on a serial cable.  Thus, once the message
hit a certain size, the radio would drop everything beyond a certain
point, and the transfer would then fail.

All they'd have to do to support D-STAR would be to create another
configuration item that was the same code as their serial port code,
with limits on how much could be transmitted out the "serial port" at a
time before an ACK from the far end. 

I never sent them this info.  Perhaps someone more into WinLink should,
if they want to do WinLink on D-STAR.  

The WinLink folks probably don't like me too much (I don't care) because
of heated debate about how their stations on HF really needed to learn
to back off if the frequency was in use, and me poking at them for
PACTOR-III not being in any way an open protocol back then, thus... real
close to "encryption" since one couldn't even copy who was hammering you
on 20M, while you were trying to do other digital modes.

I'm not a fan of how they implemented their HF side of things, but
VHF/UHF, they've done good stuff.  

It "feels" like putting all of this stuff into D-RATS is "reinventing
the wheel" again... we had ways to gateway IP to AX.25 clear back at the
JNOS days, which would have handled encapsulated STMP, just fine.  That
was in the early 90's... so, we're still fiddling around with the whole
concept of e-mail to Amateur Gateways, with no winning standard other
than WinLink which isn't (as Dan pointed out, and I agree)
cross-platform... and it's almost 2010.

Ham Radio is becoming the "master" of creating incompatible protocols...
meanwhile, SMS has ended up working fine on darn near every cell phone
on the planet... LOL!

--
  Nate Duehr, WY0X
  nate at natetech.com