Embedded From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nate Duehr Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 12:37 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] D-Star to "listen" to reflectors or distant repeaters
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. Not all the D-STAR radios have the one-touch button and on the mobiles, it is far from being one-touch, more like four or five touches. Not at all easy to do when you are supposed to be driving. 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. Doesn't really work that well. Once you get a number of repeaters in an area, you'll find that it really doesn't follow you much at all if you are driving between repeaters, yes, if you fly across country, it will follow you, at least they can find you a couple of hours after you first key down. > 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. Yes, it doesn't start immediately. But at least you CAN wait three minutes for conversations to stop and then start talking. The native routing NEVER gives you the ability to hear what is happening on the remote repeater. 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... Yep, not many people experience 1.2 GHz voice and high speed data. You did say "as designed" didn't you? Remember, that 2M and 440 D-STAR is a rarity in Japan where the system was designed. And don't think that the routing that is in the Icom implementation is necessarily the way D-STAR was designed, that's the way Icom implemented it. It would be quite consistent with the design if when you programmed your radio for legacy routing that the repeaters actually linked their selves first. 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. No, it isn't a "used to have" it's a "required to have" functionality. The Southeast Weather Net is a good example of that. You can't have a net with the legacy routing and more than 2 repeaters. And if you try to do it with the broadcast functionality in G2, that just doesn't work well unless everyone were to get DS3 connections. 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. That ONLY works between two repeater modules. And as an example of how your "ease of use" isn't, take this example. Station A on repeater 1 is talking to Station B on repeater 2. Station C on repeater 1 hears the conversation and wants to join in. Now, if they can't take the time to study their display and then look at the detail routing, they can't tell where A or B is at. But, what they hear is a conversation on the repeater, so they just respond with their normal programming. The guys tell him that he needs to use the one-touch (he's got a 2820, so it's a couple of touches and rotates) and when the guy next talks, he does his thing. He then replies and the remote guy doesn't hear him. Whoops, he one touched the wrong guy. He does it again and it still doesn't work. Evidently this time he got a bad decode at the beginning of the remote transmission and the routing didn't make it through. After 10 minutes of screwing with it and busting up a conversation, they decide to all sign. 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. ONLY if you are looking at your display. Most of the time I try to look at the road. 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. You've heard wrong. When Robin put together the first world-wide multicast net, the problems became quickly evident. For repeaters on DSL circuits, they can't handle a multi-cast of over a few stations. And the users have to program this, they can't use the one-touch. 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. I'll give you a great example of how well callsign routing can work. It the Dayton hamfest last year, the local repeater didn't have D-Plus. All remote conversations had to occur with callsign linking. There were a couple of QSOs during the weekend, but the majority of the time there were many stations callsign routing into the repeater and busting up QSOs. The on-site folks stopped using the repeater because you really couldn't carry on a conversation without someone callsign routing into the middle of it and calling CQ. And the most important part is that new users understand linking a lot better than callsign routing. I've watched a number of presenters try to explain callsign routing to new users and I just see the new user's eyes glaze over. To explain linking is much easier. Switch to the channel that you have set to link, push the PTT, wait for the repeater to indicate that it has linked, switch back to the normal channel and wait a few minutes to see if anyone is talking. Call your station or CQ. When finished, switch to the memory channel for unlinking, push the PTT and listen for the unlink command. That's it. No other user has to do anything. Japan's Amateur Radio operations are evidently quite different than those in the US and other countries. From what I've heard and seen, handhelds are rare, operators seldom have two radios. Net operations don't really exist. I guess they operate VHF/UHF much more like HF, one to one QSOs. Nate WY0X [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
