On 5/9/2025 10:01 AM, David Ranch via groups.io wrote:
I would think that D-RATS could be enhanced to work with D-RATS but it shouldn't be done via the old school KISS interface.? It would need to be done via the VARA native interface.
I have done a bunch of searching this morning and can not find anything that tells me anything about the VARA native interface or the KISS interface.
D-Rats implementation of Winlink seems to be limited to some message passing, not for chat.
D-Rats has basically these major modes of communication.
Repeater, after login, it just sends/receives its DDR2 Yencoded packets over a network connection.
Serial port: It just sends and receives its DDR2 Yencoded packets over the serial link and any radio modem that can pass through serial data will work.
AX25 mode: It sends/receives AX25 packets via the serial port or the AGWPE socket. Inside the packets is a DDR2 Yencoded packet.
KISS Mode: Looks like it just sends and receives DDR2 Yencoded packets through the serial port. Not sure if it can do that with the AGWPE interface.
Yencoding is needed for D-Star radios because the serial port is also used as a remote control for the radio and Yencoding filters out binary that could be interpreted by the radio.
If only sending data over a serial or network link is needed, the hardest part of modifying D-Rats is the way the current configure GUI is implemented and the glade tool that should allow customizing it easily is refusing to cooperate.
73,
-John
