I've been doing a number of presentations on D-STAR lately, and watching others present as well. As I watch the audience, I can see interest go up and down.
At a recent gathering, there were two D-STAR presentations, the first is what I would refer to as the historical D-STAR presentation, how it works, and which characters to put in the right place to program a radio. The second presentation was a demonstration of using D-STAR, the capabilities of both voice and data. During the first session, a number of people got up and walked out. Their impression? DSTAR was too hard. During the second session, one person left (when quizzed later, it was "to go to the bathroom") Show people that they can like D-STAR. Many people joined Amateur Radio because they saw what it could do. They didn't sit down and hear a 1 hour presentation of FM repeaters and PL. You don't have to understand something to know how to use it. And you can be an exceptional user without knowing the details of it. The technical aspects of Amateur Radio are only part of the experience. Ed WA4YIH From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nate Duehr Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 1:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [dstar_digital] Re: radio programming Jeff, KE9V had a nice podcast he'd done called "If we don't understand it, we can just ignore it" that seemed to cover the reasons why the general public has lost interest in anything technological that requires more than two seconds of actual thought... While I think we should always strive to help anyone understand anything they're confused about (as good Elmers), trying to "dumb down" D-STAR is like trying to dumb down a phone call. Neither one is all the difficult, once you understand the underlying CONCEPTS. >From a training perspective, the problem is this: Many people are task-oriented and because of that learning style, they want to know: "What buttons do I push to talk to Australia?" [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
