Eric, My best advice; forget everything you think you know about SSID, Packet, Networking, etc.
The 8th Character is significant (unlike the comment after the /) ... if you haven't registered the station including the 8th character with the gateway, it ain't going to work. I have "K7VE^^^^" and "K7VE^^^P" registered on the gateway as user terminals (hate that term and ^ is a space) so that I can use them on the gateway system. If I set mycall on one of my radios to "K7VE^^^F" the gateway is not going to let me "in" to the network. Remember, in D-STAR these are not just IDs, they are addresses, the gateway (and other components of the network) needs to know the address of the destination so it can route the traffic to it. If I tell the gateway that I want to talk to "XY3XXX" and there is no record on the gateway telling it what repeater XY3XXX uses (or last used) then it doesn't know where to send the traffic and drops it on the floor. The gateway will only keep track of this information if the callsign is properly registered to the trust server (a big database that all of the gateways in a network talk to), that takes action by the callsign holder to record their callsign with a gateway attached to the trust server. Once registered, then the callsign is propagated out to all of the gateways so they know where to send traffic for that station. What you call the SSID, is not the same thing that you know from packet, it is actually there to make the callsign unique for a station and thus must be pre-registered with the gateway system, for it to know where to route things, so if you were using a combination of your callsign with an 8th position letter, that had not been registered with the gateway system, the gateway at the far end would not know where to send traffic and the local gateway would refuse to send traffic from that radio onto the gateways since it doesn't know that callsign + 8 th character combination. Think about this for a minute, lets say W1AW^^^A is in CT, and at a hamfest, in TX, there is a station W1AW^^^H (for Hamfest) and someone tries to call W1AW on DSTAR, where does the gateway system send the traffic CT or TX? It doesn't know, but if the call was to W1AW^^^H, and it was registered on the Trust Server, now the gateway knows to send the traffic to TX and not to CT. You can go to the registration page on your gateway and set up a series of callsigns+8th character (including a blank 8th character) without having radios for all of them. By so doing they are now in the known stations table on the gateway database and can communicate using gateways. Finally, if you are worried about infrastructure, Reflectors (now some 10 of them) are on the Internet, spread around the world. If your gateway has Internet and the remote gateway has Internet, then you can route directly or you can both connect to any of the reflectors. If one of the gateways is without Internet no communications are going to happen between the gateways or through a reflector. On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Eric Gildersleeve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > Like I said we were trying this last night and we were not linked in. > > Also, the letter at the end is supposed to just be an SSID thus not > requiring anything but the actual callsign to be programmed into the > Gateway. Both, stations were set up exactly the same way except the > differences in the callsigns. > > I set everything up according to the D-STAR Calculator page. > > We were trying to make it work without the reflectors, I tried direct > call to his callsign. I just want to understand why he could talk to > us but, we couldn't talk to him. (I wrote the icf for both radios, the > data was the same.) > > -- John D. Hays - K7VE Phone: 206-801-0820 Fax: 866-309-6077 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] VOIP/SIP: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
