On Mar 12, 2009, at 9:47 PM, Woodrick, Ed wrote: > There are two ways to talk to another repeater, the first, the one > supported by the Icom software allows you to program a repeater or > user into the UR field and your packets get routed to the distant > repeater. If anyone wants to respond to you, they have to program > their radios to talk back to you. You can't listen to the distant > repeater and there is no such thing as linking and unlinking. If > someone is talking on the distant repeater, you interfere with them. >
All they have to do to "program" their rig to talk back, is to hit the one-touch button... all the rigs other than the commercial HT's, turned D-STAR by dropping in a board... have that feature. It's easy as cake to do... push and hold while they're talking, and their appropriate callsign routing information is temporarily (until you switch memory channels or change it) copied into the memory of your rig. Works almost flawlessly. Callsign routing also has the excellent additional benefit in that it will "follow" anyone anywhere in the network, as long as they've keyed down ONCE on the local repeater... wherever they may roam. If you put "WY0X" into your rig, and I go to California, Hawaii, or even just switch modules on our local repeater stack... your call will find me... as long as I've keyed once. > The method that is becoming more common is to link the repeaters. > This is done with the DPLUS software which most every repeater that > is connected with gateways are running (except Japan). With link, > you program your radio to link the repeaters, key down and then > switch back to the normal programming. At this point the two > repeaters are linked together, If someone keys down on one, it is > heard on the other. No special programming is required for users. > Matter of fact it is often hard to tell that you might be talking to > someone across the world (except for their accent). When you are > finished talking, you then unlink the repeaters. This is very > analogous to repeater linking in the FM world, or IRLP. > This kinda "dumbs down" D-STAR... and while I see it as a positive thing, you also completely lose the feature that's built into the callsign routing -- a CONFIRMATION at each unkey that your transmission made it to the other side. There's other minor nitpicks in the implementation I would mention also, like if you link in and someone's talking -- the current version of dPlus doesn't immediately start streaming the conversation -- it only starts after the next unkey. This leads to doubling and confusion, since folks think it really is "just like" IRLP or Echolink where once the VoIP path is established, if the far end is talking -- you hear it. D-Plus linking does NOT work that way, and the only SUREFIRE way to make sure you're not barging in on a conversation is to link and then WAIT at least the full repeater timeout time-constant, of 3 minutes before transmitting. If someone's long-winded in an on-going conversation (guilty as charged!) you may not hear anything until they turn it over to the next person, 3 minutes hence. > To help with determining how to program your radio for the specific > function that you want to do, head to the D-STAR Calculator at > http://www.dstarinfo.com/Calculator/ > and just select where you are and where you want to talk to, it > hopefully dramatically simplifies the entire process. > Works for callsign routing too. Just being an advocate for the system "as-designed"... too many folks never experience D-STAR as it was designed and meant to be used, because they're always D-Plus linked somewhere. Japan hasn't ever had D-Plus linking, and they communicate all over the country on their system without it, just fine... Just something to gnaw on in your head... I tend not to say that D- Plus linking is "the future" of D-STAR... it's just the implementation of what we "used to have" for linking large numbers of repeaters in the old FM world... great for generating traffic and "noise" on a quiet/dead local repeater, but if you're not looking for a general QSO, and you're looking for an INDIVIDUAL... D-STAR *excels* at that. I highly recommend folks give it a try... it's fun. It's also not hard at ALL to have a roundtable between multiple stations using callsign routing. We've done it before... Station A and B are talking via callsign routing, Station C pops up on the local repeater where Station A is at. If Station B hits their one-touch button when the remote end (Station B) is talking, now they're all set to both be heard locally (that always works), and be heard on the far end by Station B. All stations involved can hear and be heard and can have a round-table conversation. Works fine. I think a lot of people don't think about that... they think it's always a "one-to-one" relationship... I'm calling Bob. No one else can participate. But it's EASY for another person to join in with callsign routing, if they think about it a little bit. And ALL stations in that conversation get a real CONFIRMATION that the remote repeater HEARD what they transmitted. If someone "doubles"... they're going to be able to tell because they'll get "RPT?" back instead of "UR?" on their rig when they unkey. The Reflectors simply don't have this capability, and it shows during Nets if the Net controller calls for general checkins... some calls get in, others go to the bit-bucket and have to be repeated. It's not as clean as the callsign routed design. The "fix" Icom put in for large groups of repeaters is the Multicast route. This requires some pre-setup by the Gateway operators, but also works well, from what I've heard. When you start to MIX D-Plus linking and callsign routing, it really gets ugly though. You callsign route into a repeater module that's already linked somewhere, and get "carried" to the Reflector or linked repeater, but the people there can't reply. That gets messy fast. Nate WY0X
