Wouldn't it be nice if say, a group of people around the country (or world
even), could put a special call in the UR field and everyone in that group
would have their traffic automatically routed to all the other members, bit
like a multicast I suppose, but not much fun if the local repeater was already
in use.
(That's where G3 'could' come in handy, sending a message instead to the
members radio on that repeater, underneath the QSO without hindering the other
users...then you could switch to another repeater/node and continue.)
I suppose you could subscribe to a 'multicast group', something like a
reflector that handles instantaneous multiple connections.
Food for thought...
73 de Neil G7EBY.
----- Original Message -----
From: john_ke5c
To: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 10:42 PM
Subject: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: New guy
> And yes, Packet radio died because it worked. As packet became popular and
people used it, the traffic went up and eventually people left because now the
network was too congested to do anything.
AX25 reminds me quite a bit of D-Star. AX25 has two modes: connected
("linked") and unconnected (UI or broadcast). D-Star has two similar modes:
directed (UR set to a registered callsign) and CQ (UR set to CQCQCQ). When AX25
began there was some experimentation and evolution about when each mode should
be used. Unconnected was useful for calling CQ but connected was useful for
linking to bulletin boards and for QSO's although you could QSO in unconnected
mode too. Similar experimentation and evolution seems ongoing within D-Star,
especially with the dplus extension (not a part of the D-Star specification at
all).
I think people left packet before the network congestion began. Bulletin
boards became internet rather than RF connected, and there were competing
digital modes that worked more reliably, especially on HF. Although of
experimental interest, attended data modes on VHF have just never been hugely
popular. APRS caused the inherent inadequacies of the original AX25
specification for congested channels to become a real problem, but that didn't
kill packet, rather, packet evolved with UI flood/trace and NSR (no source)
routing and with more intelligent digipeaters (read "gateways"). One can only
wonder how D-Star will next adapt and evolve.
73 -- John
