John;
There is indeed resistance to change. there are factions
even in the D-Star Camp. Control of the network is being wrestled about in 2
separate networks that split. Be that as it may . We have the luxury of
taking advantage of some really impressive reverse engineering that has been
going on and does allow for adding an adapter to a suitable repeater to make
it handle digital voice.. with D-Star voice protocols. For what many analog
controllers cost. or less.
Folks who want to make the digital move need to evaluate
what they intend to do with their repeater. D-Star and P-25 have some ups
and downs of each.. In P25 there are no simple implementations of wide area
networking engineered into the CAI.. So routing calls to multiple repeaters
is not "easy". D-Star has routing in it but it is one of the complications
many complain about as it is not real intuitive on how to program it all to
get the desired results. Standalone Repeater options for either are fairly
simple. At this point assuming you have a digital capable station.. I think
it just became cheaper to do D-star conversion of that station. At least one
author is working diligently to allow both analog and digital use of the
Digital repeater modification he wrote and offers.. but it is in it's
infancy..
Anyone who is currently building analog AllStar Link repeaters using a DMK
URI already has the parts for a D-Star repeater .. assuming your TX and RX
will handle GMSK data of your repeater.. This includes many Mastr II
stations which seem to be a large portion of the amateur repeater world..
Cheap sound card interfaces..$ 10.00 each on Ebay or less can be used to
build the "controller" when hooked to a PC with appropriate software..
I built my first "Test" D-Star repeater from 2 Icom F420 commercial mobiles
and 2 USB Sound Fobs with a USB I/O controller to run the cor and PTT..
It works.. albeit basic. but $$$$ is not the key ingredient now.
Doug
KD8B
From: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:repeater-buil...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of John Szwarc
Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 7:11 AM
To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [Repeater-Builder] Re: D-Star (Protocol and Repeaters)
Okay. I've been reading with some interest the threads on D-STAR. There
have been some very good points and some pretty amusing ones. P25 sounds
interesting, but you will have to take note of the fact that it has not been
widely accepted by the ham community. And considering that it (P25) is not
compatible with D-STAR's AMBE codec, I doubt that it will be accepted by
hams anytime soon. Who cares if D-STAR takes up repeater pairs that could
be used for analog? Have you listened to the analog repeaters? They're
mostly silent anyway. One comment that I read early on (and I don't recall
who said this) was that in an emergency the analog users would not be able
to access a D-STAR repeater. Yep, but so what? Do you really mean to tell
me that each local area is covered by just one analog repeater? It just
sounds to me like typical human behavior: resistance to change.
There's a good friend of mine that was so ticked off at the institution of
no-code hams. He calls them "rif-raff". He operates almost exclusively on
the CW sections of the HF bands to avoid the no-code folks. It's sad
because there are a lot of no-code hams that are good operators and some are
very technically knowledgeable. He might learn a thing or two from these
folks. I wonder if the people in this group that are resisting D-STAR are
missing the boat as well. Maybe there is something they could learn from
D-STAR? Maybe they could find ways to to improve it? Of course that won't
happen if they are too busy trying to talk people out of it in favor of P25
or old fashioned analog.
Just my 2 cents. I'll go back to my corner now.
John N3SPW
_____
From: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:repeater-buil...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Nate Duehr
Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 4:01 AM
To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Re: D-Star (Protocol and Repeaters)
