[aprssig] The best resolution of --- Xastir.

[Dave Baxter]

Just to add my 5 egg's worth.

I gave up with Xastir in the end.  It didn't prove to be stable on
Cygwin, but there again, it was an old version, way behind what is
currently propagated, with no updated version for the Cygwin environment
even on the horizon.  Someone said I could have the development sources
and recompile.  Yeah right.  Have you looked at doing that on Cygwin,
and all the extra stuff you need to install?  Unless you know it
(Cygwin/Linux) inside out and sideways, forget it...

I also found that the menu structure was way to random, not that UI-View
is better, but it does have functions more or less grouped in similar
places.  Some of Xastir I liked, much I just didn't feel comfy with.
The symbols on the map were often too small to see, and though the size
could be changed, it didn't seem to want to remember that setting
between sessions.

But the real show stopper?  As usual, lack of decent map's for the UK
and EU.  I must have spent hours crawling the web, hitting hundreds of
dead links to what others are said to have done.  UI-View maps a plenty,
for Xastir, very little by comparison outside of the US.

OK, so it may be possible to roll my own, but I never had much success
with doing that with UI-View either, ending up with all sorts of
positioning errors.  Most maps available in a form to "capture" are not
aligned with the INGR grid, but with local grids, hence the offsets.

The final nail in the coffin, was that I found it very creaky to
interface to a "Real" TNC (TNC-220 in KISS mode)  Where as, UI-View,
just does it, and it just works, nine times out of ten, it would lock up
the TNC, needing power off and battery out to recover it.  It worked a
little better with the D7, but still had stability issues with the com
port.

It also had some odd effects on other networking background processes I
run in Windows(2k)  Since removing Xastir and Cygwin, then doing a clean
install of Cygwin, I can still use the Cygwin stuff, but the strange
interactions have gone.  More a Cygwin problem than Xastir I suspect,
but......

I trawled the various forums, those I could without answering silly
questions to register (just to view?) but most if not all of the
mutterings were related to what feature to add, and how good it is over
anything Windows has to offer.

I still use Cygwin by the way, I use that for it's SSH tunnel and run
VNC over it from this laptop at work, tunnelling through PuTTY, to
remote manage an Echolink Proxy, and other stuff.  So something good
came out of it...  As above, had to re-install it all though.

Cheers....

Dave G0WBX.

PS:	Like those Uniden marine radios.  Wonder if the thing is flash
programmable?  Something like that on 2m, with local mapping and APRS
would be a show stealer par excellence!