The September issue of QST arrived in my mailbox yesterday, complete with my D-RATS article on page 34!
The idea to write an article about D-RATS came much earlier in the year (way back in February), once we had used it rather extensively in our Tuesday night on-the-air testing sessions. As such, a couple of the screenshots show version 0.1.6, which seems ancient to me now. It also means the article mentions only features that have been around for a long time. Thus it leaves out most of the interesting mapping features and the new session support for unattended transfers, tunneling of TCP traffic, etc.
Anyway, it’s nice to see it there and hopefully people will check out the D-RATS wiki for the updates.
The article is available in PDF format here . The editors of QST have graciously allowed me to reproduce the article on my personal web site. Please note the QST copyright and do not distribute it further.
In other D-RATS news, we did a fair bit of real-life work with it over the weekend at the Hillsboro Air Show. We used the forms capability to send several “lost child” reports back and forth between the first aid tents and the command post, which worked quite well. We also used the text messaging capabilities to send some tactical messages while loud jets were overhead. The text messaging also helped to notify someone of a non-critical event instead of tying up the voice frequency and net control operator.
We did run into some issues both mornings, which seemed to be caused by some sort of weird RFI corrupting packets in just the right way to trigger a bug. I still haven’t been able to reproduce it locally, but I did get some debug information captured which might be enough to spot something. I hope I don’t have to wait until next year’s show to try out the changes!
We also tested the image sending (resize/resample) functionality a little bit, but didn’t use it heavily because of timing. However, below is an image of some guy with a callsign of KK7DS who posed (against his will) for a sample shot:
