Not exactly in the way I'm guessing you're thinking of.
The ExternalMessageSource port type was created for exactly the reason you're talking about: so an arbitrary message can be sent through the application at any time. However, it doesn't create the message; the external application has to compose the APRS packet. I once thought about adding macro support so you could send a position message and have various parameters (latitude, longitude, timestamp, etc.) be plugged in on-the-fly from the YAAC configuration and runtime state, but there never was enough demand for more functionality there (and enough other places in the code that did have demands) that I never got around to it. The problem with reading a file is that you can't asynchronously detect when the file has been changed. I'm not particularly thrilled with the WXNOW.TXT port driver, because it has to poll the file every few seconds to see if it has been changed, which isn't the most efficient way to do things. And there's no platform-portable way (other than network sockets) to poke the YAAC application from outside the application to tell it to do something programmatically. Thankfully, someone wrote the NetCat command (sometimes called nc or ncat) which provides the relay between network sockets and files or shell scripts, so if you wanted to copy a file containing a packet into YAAC, you could use the 'nc' command to copy it to the External Message Source listening socket, which would cause the message to be transmitted. Hope that helps. Andrew, KA2DDO author of YAAC ________________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Paul Bramscher Sent: Wednesday, January 5, 2022 9:36 PM Greetings Andrew, I'm wondering whether YAAC is capable of being programmatically "triggered" to send a beacon, and whether it can read the contents of a file as its message. I see some reference in the docs () but I don't know if that's quite what I'm looking for. It would be interesting if there was a sort of API such that we might provide a beacon message and a command to transmit on-demand. I don't have a particular use-case, but it seems that a number of possibilities might exist (Linux user here). 73, KD0KZE / Paul |