There are a couple of new features:
If you never do any routing (you only do linking), you can disable IRCDDB by clearing the ha parameter in the IRCDDB Menu of ./qnconfig. This normally defaults to "rr.openquad.net", so you have to set it to an empty string by entering "ha" followed by a <return>. Also make sure the hb parameter has its default value. This will shut off the traffic between your gateway and the QuadNet Servers and so will be especially useful to users that have a low-quality, low-speed connection to the internet. Because you're not connected to the QuadNet Servers, you won't see your transmission on the www.openquad.net Last Heard page, but you will still see your activity on any reflector dashboard, including XLX307, XRF757 and XRF735.
Two new columns have been added to the Last Heard dashboard: the sender's 20-character text message, and, if the sender has enabled the GPS in his radio, his current 6-character Maidenhead grid square, linked to google maps. To make these new columns work, qngateway now reads the slow data that is sent in the AMBE voice packets. This slow data is not encoded, so it's is not that reliable, you may occasional see some unusual characters in the text message, or you may see a message in the qngateway log that it can't figure out how to parse the GPS data.
There is also a big internal change. Inter-process communication now uses bidirectional Unix sockets. QnetGateway has been using one-way Unix sockets as a way to emulate the previous UDP communications over the loopback device (127.0.0.1), but this new protocol is even more efficient than the one-way Unix sockets.
Finally, there is also a new capability in this release that can't be used yet because there is no infrastructure to support it. We're working on that and when that infrastructure becomes available, I'll make an announcement here.
Tom Early