I agree with all your points. Your point about the need for money to help spur change was certainly true of D-Star in the beginning, but we are just on the verge of being able to bring up very inexpensive D-Star repeaters using non-ICOM solutions. A ham near me is setting up a Node Adapter repeater using KB9KHM's DVAR Hot Spot software in full duplex mode. He got some inexpensive radios out of commercial service, built an inexpensive computer, bought an inexpensive duplexer and a decent antenna, and he's on his way. Another ham spent less than US $200 since he had or was given a lot of equipment, but he calculated by being clever he could have done the whole project from scratch for US $500. Right now, these "repeaters" are DPlus only -- they don't support G2 callsign routing, but in the US, they provide over 90% of the functions hams want for very little effort and money.
We all are awaiting the release of Dave Lake G4ULF's software that runs on Linux and has been accepted by the US Trust team to be connected in as a full blown G2 compatible repeater. The Open Trust efforts already have solutions that are entirely PC based. What we are expecting now is a new wave of inexpensive repeaters to be put up that will then encourage more people to buy D-Star radios. This second wave of expansion will be less dependent on money and more on publicity and word of mouth. Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: Nate Duehr To: dstar_digital@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, July 12, 2010 1:37 AM Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Are you exprerencing anti d-star in your area? On Jul 12, 2010, at 2:02 AM, Nate Duehr wrote: > All it takes to grow D-STAR (or any other new mode in any particular area) is time and money... D-STAR has flourished in some areas due to massive influxes of taxpayer dollars in the form of government grants... some local, some Federal. in other areas, it's alive but weak... and in still others, it's not doing anything at all. Clarification: This was meant to be worded in such a way as to say it's very much flourishing in some areas, mediocre in others, and low in still others. And of course, there's also places where it's flourishing where large sums of personal monies have been spent on it, not just the government money areas... that sentence was badly worded. The point here was... it takes a lot of $ to change out infrastructure, no matter what mode or type it is... and in a recession, it's not going to grow at super-fast rates in most areas, but in areas where there's interest/money to do it, it took off, for sure. Once someone buys/builds the infrastructure, users show up at a pretty good clip, usually. Then it tapers off. I see about 4 registration requests a month in the area now. We're one of the "medium interest/money" areas, and it wouldn't have really gotten off the ground without donated repeaters to kick-start it. That led to some locals donating a few thousand dollars worth of duplexer, feedline, antennas, and tower space. Now there's a couple more on the air. One off of grant money, two privately funded... It still doesn't have a ton of "traction", but we do have over 100 registered users... so we're square in the middle of the bell-curve. Basically growth of repeater networks comes down to either having a "sugar-daddy" who'll buy a lot of stuff... or government money... or a large enough club/organization to "spread the load" of the up-front infrastructure costs... once that part's handled, it's just about time and effort to get it on the air. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X n...@natetech.com
