e_l_green KI6WBX wrote: "Which brings up the question of why 144/440 is all that's commercially available for D-STAR use, given the crowding... "
I've read that since Japan amateurs don't have access to the 220 mHz band, Japanese radio manufacturers are less inclined to design for that band. Too bad they can't make enough money selling into other markets worldwide to justify tri-band D-Star radios. Every year at Dayton I give the Kenwood USA National Sales Manager for Amateur Products a hard time about no D-Star. At first, the reasons were logical to me -- they weren't sure D-Star would make it and figured they'd let ICOM do the heavy lifting (investing) to get it going. Another interesting reason in the US, if true, had to do with government procurement policies (say for emergency centers) requiring purchased product types to have at least two vendors to encourage competition. I can't believe that still is an issue, since I've read in some places US Homeland Security funding has been used to build D_Star repeater networks. But the point was that Kenwood has been making money selling into EmComm centers and fears a Kenwood D-Star offering would canabalize those sales while the D-Star competition might spark a price war with ICOM. Good for us, not so good for them. I have a lot of Kenwood radios, and will continue to track their new HF offerings, but I can't imagine I'll buy another Kenwood VHF/UHF analog radio. I'm using a Kenwood D700 as the analog radio for my D-Star Hotspot. It had been sitting unused in the closet and at least it's back in service. It just sits on its simplex frequency and passes the gmsk stream through to the Hotspot board and PC. I think Kenwood, Yaesu and Alinco are missing out on some profits as D-Star continues to grow. Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: e_l_green To: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2010 10:40 AM Subject: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: US D-STAR band planning and directories (Was:No DSTAR in South Carolina or G --- In dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com, Jay Maynard <jmayn...@...> wrote: > But the D-Star community can help, too. Is 2 meters full? Then DON'T PUT UP > A 2-METER BOX! Pretty much every D-Star radio these days is a dual bander. > The few single-banders are all first-generation and a pain to use, and the > D-Star community has long recommended that people not use them anyway. Given > that, what difference does it make whether the repeater is on 2 or 440? One word: PAVEPAWS. There is a moratorium on new coordinated 440 repeaters here on the West Coast due to interference issues. My understanding is that some parts of the East Coast have the same issues. Which brings up the question of why 144/440 is all that's commercially available for D-STAR use, given the crowding in the 144 band and now, apparently, in the 440 band. Digital voice cell phones are operating successfully in bands near the 33cm and 23cm bands, but apparently the only amateur radios using those bands are homebrews.
