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)