There's a little bit of reality that's being left out of this discussion that definitely needs to be interjected.
When the conversation is using voice, there is absolutely no issues with the tactical callsigns being used on voice. Actually D-STAR makes it much more effective as you don't have to use voice to make the legal identification, you can stay completely in the tactical callsign realm. When sending data, remember that you usually have to program a callsign in the software. This is because that the protocol level callsigns are not presented to the software, the software has to create it's own identification. So, in the software you can set a tactical call and again the radios themselves can stay with the legal callsign and the application handles the tactical callsigns. Now, if you use the space after the / or the short message field to hold a tactical identification, then the information will be seen in most places where the callsign is displayed, such as a radio or repeater log. So I think that this is LOT less of an issue that we seem to be making it. On a personal observation note, with many years of packets use and some D-STAR use behind me, I find that if people have to switch fields such as the MYCALL or ALIAS during either a practice or an actual event, they often don't Ed WA4YIH From: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com [mailto:dstar_digi...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of John D. Hays Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 1:44 AM To: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Tactical Call indication The 20 character message works very well and would be a good place to do "Tactical" if you need more than 4 chars.
