[drats_users] D-Rats Using The DV-Dongle

[Ron Wenig]

Dan,

Usually the RF to RF chats are good.  Every once in a while there is a 
broken packet and that's understandable because of RF conditions.  
Dongle to Dongle seems to be ok also.  It's just Dongle to RF where 
there is a problem and to the point that it's not usable.  The Dongle 
users usually can copy the D-Rats chats from the RF users ok. 

Ron ny3j

Dan Smith wrote:
>> 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...
>
>