APRS Connect 1.7.0: messages that wait for a station, and net rooms that count
APRS Connect 1.7.0 is on Google Play now. Two things in it are worth a proper explanation: a failed message can now wait for its station and try again when that station is heard, and a net room tells you how many people are on the net and who has checked in tonight.
Retry when heard
APRS messaging has always had one weak spot. You send a message, the other station is not on the air, the retries run out, and the message is marked as not delivered. From then on it is your job to notice when they come back and send it again by hand.
In 1.7.0 you can leave the message waiting instead. When a message fails, the app offers to retry it when the station is heard. Accept, and the app watches for that exact station, down to the SSID, for two weeks. The moment a packet from it arrives, the message goes out again with its normal run of attempts. If that run fails too, the app holds off for an hour before the next hearing can trigger another try, then eight hours after that. Three rounds and it gives up and tells you. Only the final failure sends a notification. The tries in between are silent, so a station that is drifting in and out of range does not turn into a stream of alerts.
A few details worth knowing:
- Waiting messages show a line under the message in the thread, and a "Waiting to be heard" screen, reachable from the inbox banner or the More menu, lists all of them with a Stop waiting button.
- The failure notification carries the choice as buttons, so you can pick "Retry now" or "Retry when heard" without opening the app.
- Settings → Messages lets you choose whether the app asks each time, always waits, or never does. The default is to ask.
- A message sent over RF only, with no path to the internet, is retried only when the station is heard on your own radio. Hearing it through APRS-IS proves nothing about whether it can hear you.
- If QRX has already stored a copy of your message for that station, the app does not offer to wait. QRX will hand it over when the station returns.
Retry when heard is part of APRS Connect Pro. The manual retry stays in the free app.
Net rooms
A net room collects everything an ANSRVR group says into one conversation, so #APRSThursday reads as a room rather than as dozens of separate threads. 1.7.0 adds the two things people kept asking the room to tell them.
The first is the head count. The status strip now shows how many stations are subscribed to the group, together with how old that figure is, because ANSRVR only states the count in some of its replies and it can be hours stale. While you are checked in, an Update button asks ANSRVR for a fresh count with a single packet that nothing else in the room sees.
The second is the roster. The room lists who has checked in during your current check-in, and only them. Before this release the list carried over from the last time you were on the net, which meant reading about stations that were there a week ago. Now it starts fresh each time you join.
The iOS app is with Apple for review. There is no App Store listing yet. The notify list on the home page hears first.
