Andy, At leas one of our members has been in touch with the developer and made requests to simplify the cut and paste options of the text transfer. There have been numerous updates, and the text transfer has been updated to make it more adaptable for use to insert blocks of text for broadcast. All the other functions of the BSR and FIX apply to the text function. If you were tasked with sending the participants of a net a rather intricate set of instructions, taskings, or specifications, and had to be sure each member had received it properly, you could spend a major part of an hour with requests for fills or repetitions, words phonetically, groups, or numbers. With easypal, you get what you get on the original transmission, and you send the BSR (Bad Segment Request) and the sending station sends the FIX file containing only those segments. Each member receives benefit of any bad block that they missed in a FIX file sent to another member, since it is a broadcast (non-connected) protocol. If you were involved in dial-up file transfer in the 80s, when text files were "captured" you will remember that it took as much time to capture a space as it did a letter. Transfer protocols were created the compressed ASCII on the fly to improve through put, I seem to remember J-modem, I-modem, y-modem and others that had the compression routines built in. I remember using a shell on ProComm Plus to allow choosing up to 14 different transfer protocols, dependent on the type of file you were transferring. I had at least 9 options available on the BBS I ran from the late 80s to the mid 90s. If Easypal can send a perfect high resolution picture in a 20K Wave file, you can imagine how small a 2 page document would be when converted to binary, data digitized into a wave file then sent in this manner to assure error-free reception. The repeater function allows the file to be sent to a central repository then retrieved individually by the members who could retrieve the file list. The program is getting very polished, and has great potential. I don't know if it is getting much exposure in all regions, but it is a valuable tool for the toolbox. As far as acceptance, MARS is a fairly diverse group of folks. Some are up in age, some are retired and homebound, some are fit and ready for deployment at the drop of a hat. Since there are requirements for continued membership, participation requirements, reporting requirements, requirements for pulling NCS and ANCS, requirements for NIMS compliance, now the requirement for a General or higher license.... Then you can see that the members have to meet certain obligations and benchmarks to continue to be a member. With this in mind, the program has some fairly receptive members, who wanted to go further in their service in, and understanding of the art of communications.. Most of them are quite willing to try something new. We haven't spent the degree of time on Easypal as we have with MT-63. But with each region having up to 10 one hour long nets scheduled each day, and each net has the requirement for some sort of training, and many members are uniquely qualified in one aspect of the training or another, it becomes fairly easy to see how a new mode can be introduced, explained, setup and operation help given, and results seen within the course of an hour and in an interactive manner in a disciplined net structure. Is MARS the silver bullet? Hardly. It has it's growing pains as much as any organization. In Amateur Radio, if there is a community that has 3 Amateur Radio operators, there will be 4 opinions on every subject and pretty soon there will be the need for 5 repeaters to be established so they can communicate with their "group". We all can key the Mic, but many times, as "communicators" we show that we can send out a signal, but actual communication is not often what results. The organized format of MARS, the requirements, continuous training, forward looking (not driving the car by only looking through the rear-view mirror), the disciplined net structure. All of these things help form a group that is dedicated to the art of emergency communications. Once that subset is created, most of the QRM is left behind, and they can concentrate on the task at hand. Overall, I am usually fairly happy to be associated with MARS. BTW, the General class or higher requirement was recently introduced, with the main purpose to allow interoperability with ARES, RACES and other Amateur radio groups. So we would sure like to see some organized effort for both groups to start working together. As usual, far more of an answer than you requested, but maybe some extra content slipped in that makes the big picture more visible. David KD4NUE
-----Original Message----- From: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com [mailto:digitalra...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Andrew O'Brien Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 12:01 AM To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com Subject: [digitalradio] Easypal in MARS - > > As an aside, if you really want to see something that is slick, give Easy > Pal a shot for sending text. Also ultra high resolution pictures with no > scan lines that occupy 20KB of data on each end. 90 seconds to send or > receive, with the ability to only request the individual blocks that weren't > received properly to be sent again. We are also utilizing it in MARS. > > As I said, I am still optimistic, > > David > KD4NUE David, I am interested to learn of this. Rick , myself , and several others in this group played around with EasyPal a year or so ago, we also thought it had interesting uses for file transfers. How it are MARS folks accepting EasyPal? Andy K3UK
