"Old-fashioned?" If you take being fashionable out of the argument, analog NBFM has some advantages which may not be appreciated until they're gone, particularly in emergency ops.
Interoperability has been covered already, but there are some more subtle advantages to analog. If you have a station getting into the system only intermittently, is the operator being called away from the mic by local circumstances, or is he not making the repeater? Is it fading on the path, or a dying battery? Or, is something interfering with him on the input? How will you know? If it was analog, you could troubleshoot instantly, in your head, just by listening to the output. One of the problems facing LMR is the retirement of the last generation of techs who've ever heard "picket-fencing." There is an intuitive understanding of issues such as multipath we all acquired using NBFM. Some of the new kids who've only played with digital have read about multipath, and maybe learned how to predict or measure it, but they'll have to look in a book to know how to fix it. Will they even think to try moving the car 3 inches to see if it works now? In emergencies, you may also miss out on information contributed by someone overhearing your conversation in some digital scenarios. There's also listenability. Given the choice between an analog NBFM system set up properly, and a D* repeater, I know which I'd rather have playing in my headphones for 8 hours at a Red Cross shelter. (Disclaimer: I also still prefer a good AM signal to SSB, and good vinyl audio recordings to 32K MP3s. ;^) 73, Paul, AE4KR ----- Original Message ----- From: John Szwarc To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 5:10 AM Subject: RE: [Repeater-Builder] Re: D-Star (Protocol and Repeaters) ...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... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
