I am testing out the latest build of D-Rats version 0.4.1 on a Raspberry Pi 4 and a 400 and have run into a number of bugs.? I wonder if anyone else has experienced these problems and may have a fix.? As you may already know, we can no longer install fresh instances of version 0.3.9 on a machine that never had it before because they have now obsoleted a number of dependencies for Python 2 that were required to run the older version.? I tried and was unsuccessful.? Anyway, these are some of the things I have found are either not working correctly or at all:
1.? Maps not rendering properly - The maps load fine but do not display the proper positions of other stations.? When positions are requested, the other stations are responding with their decimal positions.? However, the new D-Rats is reading and converting them to degrees, minutes, & seconds throwing all of the positions off by miles.? It shows my StTammany Ratflector out in the swamp instead of at the same location.? This is not good if you are trying to track your assets during an Emcomm event? For example KG5CEN-1 sends a position report of 30.366000, -89.77620, but when the version 0.4.1 receives it, it gets changed to 30.2260, -89.4670 and displays it on the map approx. 20 miles out of position.
2. The program is not connecting with or reading an attached GPS dongle properly.? It sometimes says it is unable to open the GPS port and other times says it cannot get a GPS lock even though the position is able to be obtained on the same computer using a different program, such as YAAC APRS client.
3. The Winlink feature over Telnet is not working.
4. Not a problem for the program, but we used to tell everyone to set up a Gmail account to be able to forward outgoing emails addressed to a regular Internet email account.? This no longer works as Google has decided that D-Rats is an insecure method of handling emails and will no longer accept mail from D-rats.? I am using an outlook.com address available for free from Microsoft.? If you are having problems in this regard, you might look into outlook mail accounts or some other email account that has not locked out D-Rats due to security concerns.
5. When trying to print emails - On simple text emails, the message does not word-wrap on the printed page.? The message can be read on the computer, but when trying to print using the Print button, the rendered message gets truncated at the end of the page instead of rolling over to the following line.? Unless you write very short paragraphs, some of your text will be dropped off the right side of the printed page.
6. Attempting to save, send, or print an ARRL radiogram, an NHC Hurricane Report, a Skywarn Report or the hics260 form causes an error, but calls to print the ICS forms are rendered correctly and can be saved, sent, or printed in Firefox.? Trying to fill out the above forms and the program will not allow the message to be saved or sent.? It always gives an error message that can be ignored.? The forms are presently unusable.
So far, Chats and File Transfers are working as expected.? The filters are functioning normally.? QST's to beacon position and pick up data from OpenWeather are working..? I have not tried all of the QST selections yet.? I also have not updated the program on my Windows machines as version 0.3.9 iis still stable on them and I don't want to mess them up as we are now moving into hurricane season.? As storms move closer to the US I usually try to post the bulletins from the National Hurricane Center.? I download the bulletins to a file that D-rats can import and display through the QST feature.
Don't get me wrong.? I appreciate all the hard work it must have taken to port the program over to using Python 3.? I am not sure that I have all the needed GDK-3 dependencies loaded.? I picked up all I could find in the Pi's Add or Remove Software feature in Preferences.? I wanted to mention these bugs because I have not seen them brought up yet.? It has been hard getting more folks interested in using D-Rats as a serious tool as things keep happening over time that has continued to break the software to render certain features unusable.
Glen - KG5CEN
Glen Strecker