> 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.
DStar callsign routing does not provide the nearly instanteous roaming that you may be used to with your cell phone or a trunked two-way radio system. Folks have posted on this in the past, and when the gateway system software was working correctly, a four to ten minute delay was pretty common for the roaming database to catch up when a user keyed up on a different gateway. So if you are driving along the highway and switch from one repeater-gateway to another, folks trying to callsign route a DV stream to you will be unsuccessful for about that length of time. Lately the gateway database synchronization has been slower and sporadic, and some gateways were not updated for days at a time. When this happens, callsign routing will fail to work for folks who have "roamed" to a different gateway. Slash routing to a gateway band module (UR=/KE5RCSA)and dplus gateway linking still work so long as a gateway has not changed its IP address. > 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. Multicast must be statically set up in advance by each gateway sysop and works poorly when more than a just a few gateways are involved. Each involved gateway has to send a DV stream to each other involved gateway. That it is not used more is confirmation that it does not work well. Oh, and you cannot call sign route to join in a multicast QSO. 73 -- John
