On Mar 22, 2009, at 6:30 PM, ipscone wrote: > Followup on use of "/": > > Ok, I've used the "/" when calling a Japan destination. I had > thought this was because Japan was using older software. But am I > confused on the reason? >
The reason is that Japan is under a completely different "Trust Server" than the U.S., which we didn't even used to have the ability to talk to just a little under one year ago. During Dayton last year, Icom announced that the two Trust Server environments would be able to call between one-another for the first time, ever. How they implemented this is by only doing repeater callsigns. Repeaters in both systems were populated into the other. USERS are not cross-linked yet. (Example: If you travel to Japan and a friend puts your callsign into his rig and calls you, the call will route to the last place you keyed up in the U.S. Trust Server domain, not in Japan.) There is no "umbrella" trust server system (yet, if there ever will be) nor a working worldwide synchronization system. Many European repeaters are under the U.S. Trust Server, so the phrase "U.S. Trust Server" is confusing. In Japan, both repeaters and the trust server are operated quite differently. They're operated by JARL (the equivalent of our ARRL). Here, the Trust Server and all the Gateways are owned/operated by individual hams or groups. Amateur Radio repeaters in Japan are quite different. About once a year, a major announcement comes out about D-STAR that changes everything... a couple years ago it was Gateway Version 2.0 software, after that the announcement that we could converse with Japan's repeaters... "Stay tuned" as they say, there's all sorts of things the Gateways can do... it's "just" a software change away. > 1) Is the "/" required on ALL calls, where one is using a repeater > vs an individual callsign, in the UR field? Even in the U.S.? > The "/" tells the Gateway to look in a different table of callsigns, so to speak. Repeaters, instead of looking for users. > 2) If a "/" is used, is it the protocol to announce your calling > repeater, to allow the called station to know your origination > repeater? I had assumed (probably falsely) that this was the > protocol only when calling a Japan station. > It's not technically necessary on the U.S. systems because the "callee" can just press their one-touch button and temporarily set YOUR callsign in their radio to talk back to you. But yes, it's still good practice to announce who you are, who you're calling (or that it's a general CQ call), what repeater and module you're on, and how you're routing to them... "callsign routing", or "I've linked the repeaters with D-Plus". > Can this "/" be explained in a little more detail, for various > scenarios? > Does the above help? The ARRL VHF/UHF Handbook has an good section on the original callsign routing system, but it does have an error... most port letters in the examples are backward.... A = is usually 1.2 GHz, B = UHF, C = VHF on almost every U.S. system. They're "backward" in the ARRL book. But that's easy to fix with a pen... so the descriptions then make sense. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X n...@natetech.com
