All: 

I have a question regarding HF and I-Gates.

Most of my APRS experience has been limited to chatting on HF (Robust Packet) with a limited number of stations. I recently came across an I-gate station that was able to chat with me on 30 meters and I wondered how one finds HF (RF only) stations and chatting with them via an I-gate? I'm assuming it starts with filtering all APRS-IS traffic except HF-RF stations?  

Obviously, my knowledge of APRS is limited so I'm not sure if I-gate-to-HF chats are standard practice or maybe frowned upon for whatever reason. 

Thanks, Tony 

Unfortunately, there is nothing standard in an APRS packet that identifies what band it is on.

That said, if you have a list of known HF (only) IGates, you could use the e/ filter to list those and set your range to zero.   Such a configuration should (mostly) get only packets gated to the APRS-IS by the specified IGates.

Tony,
What is your call sign?
I get messages all the time on my HF station. I don't think my station sends a ACK for messages. I am running Direwolf and Ui-View. I don't think Direwolf supports all of the messaging parameters.

Wayne
WA5LUY

Are the messages addressed to Direwolf or Ui-View?   Only the addressed instance is supposed to generate an ack, and an ack should only be generated if the original message requested it by including a Message ID (see page 81-82 of http://www.aprs.org/doc/APRS101.PDF).  The gentleman's agreement, I believe, on HF is to not request acks when sending messages.  I don't know what setting UI-View has for this, but in APRSIS32, you simply uncheck the "Ack" checkbox in the chat dialog.

Lynn,
Thanks for your reply.

Are the messages addressed to Direwolf or Ui-View? I don't understand the question. I am running Direwolf as an 10M I-gate. UI-View is connected to Drewolf via AGWPE. If someone sends a message to WA5LUY-10 that comes in from the internet I never see it in UI-View. If someone sends a message to WA5LUY-10 via RF I see it in UI-View but my station does not send an ack.
I realize this is not the Direwolf or UI-View  forum to sort this out. I receive a number of test messages via RF. My question to Tony about his call was to see if he was one of those folks sending a test message.

Wayne
WA5LUY

Direwolf can be configured to be simply a modem interface between other APRS client software and a radio, or it can implement higher level APRS features like digipeating and position beaconing on its own.  For anything more than simply being a modem, Direwolf should be configured with its own unique callsign-SSID.   And every APRS client instance, like your UI-View, should also be configured with a completely unique callsign-SSID.   This is done so that you can tell which software is doing what when it comes to packets.

So, do you have a callsign-SSID configured in your Direwolf configuration, and what callsign-SSID do you have configured into UI-View?  And is UI-View also connected to the APRS-IS with a non-blank filter, or is it only connected to Direwolf for RF access?

I'll entertain this discussion on this list because it doesn't matter if the client is UI-View or APRSIS32, the way the station(s) interact with APRS, both RF and -IS, is the same.

Lynn,
At present UI-View is only connected to Direwolf for RF with no SSID. Direwold connected to the Pi handles all the I-Gate traffic to the internet. The computer running UI-View is an old XP running several other programs and with it connected to APRS-IS it was just overloaded. I see what you are getting at by having two SSID's. So for now  basically I am using UI-View in the XP machine as a monitor. It does show received packets in the monitor terminal and creates a neat map of stations heard but of course it will not send a message.
I don't normally look at UI-View so messaging would be only hit and miss situation. For now I think I will just leave it as it is.
By the way Tony did send me a direct message and he was one of the stations I  saw in the message terminal.
73
Wayne
WA5LUY