John,
I think you are on the right track, but I don't see Icom doing
this. it would have to be something that we in the after market come up
with. By mentioning the UI are you referring to the programming software or
the on/in radio interface?
I'd like to comment on a few of your points below.
1) some like the touch screen, I'm not that interested in it. But
that's just me!
2) right on the money, I'd live to be able to go into lets say
www.dstarusers.org <http://www.dstarusers.org/> and download the
information for a specific area OR be able to download ALL of it for a
particular country then using the software choose what to load and what not
to. I had already wanted to build files with each state for DSTAR but that
is a huge amount of work, so I haven't quite started it yet
3) is this information you want pre-programmed into the radio? Not a bad
idea, I think it's Uniden that has a scanner that does this for public
safety frequencies, so I don't think it's a far reach
4) I think this would go hand in hand with #2
Those are my thoughts,
Thanks for posting up your thought, nice to see more folks thinking along
this line!!
73,
Adam
KG4WWH
_____
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
On Behalf Of john_ke5c
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2008 1:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] The big DStar breakthrough needs to be ...
I've been meaning to clean this post up for a while, but since I don't
think I'll really do that soon, here's the rough hypothesis: the next
big breakthrough in DStar will be a user-friendly user interface. The
current DStar radio interfaces were developed before DStar really was
used much and do not reflect how these radios really are and can be
used. Many folks hear about DStar, buy a radio, try it for a few
weeks, then put it aside or sell it because they feel it is too
complicated.
The current DStar radio UI's are as powerful and functional as DOS,
and they need to become like windows - note that's a small 'w' so I
mean the generic concept rather than a specific Windoze or X-windows,
etc. How would this happen? A new radio UI is implemented with:
1) a 'glass cockpit' style of interface - an LCD that is either itself
touch sensitive or is surrounded by softkeys, or both. This is
against the trend of physicially smaller and smaller radios, but look
at some of the current smart phones. HT's don't have to fit in a
shirt pocket;
2) a repeater/gateway database that is EASILY downloaded and updated
via the internet - wifi too so you can do this in your driveway;
3) no additional 'programming' of the radio to use this downloaded
data. The radio will present this data to the user via the UI in one
of several useable forms such as lookup by city, by geographic
distance from the radio which also has a GPS of course and by good old
callsign;
4) selecting a repeater from the database sets all necessary DStar
callsigns, frequency parameters, etc;
5) a builtin help system;
6) a logical presentation of the "one-touch call" to callsign route
back to a caller on a distant gateway. The UI might popup the
caller's information and the matching database information for the
caller's gateway and ask if you wish to engage in a QSO now or save
for a few minutes later;
7) some limited last heard information accessible via the low-speed
(limited bandwidth) data subchannel;
8) reflector linking (via an in-range repeater/gateway - callsign
routing to the gateway?), perhaps using the low-speed data subchannel
to send a keep-alive request every 30 to 60 seconds to the selected
reflector to keep you linked;
9) multiple uses of the low-speed data subchannel so GPS data might be
alternated with a reflector keep alive request, etc.;
There's more, but this is enough to be food for thought.
73 -- John
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