On Tue, 19 May 2009 18:45:53 -0400, "Woodrick, Ed" > So I guess if you want to get down to nitpicking, if the callsign is not > in the field then you need to make sure to switch your radio to FM and > identify appropriately.
Actually the opposite is true... Recent FCC cases have affirmed that, for example, digital HF voice needs to remain in the VOICE portion of the band... they consider it voice, even though it's clearly a digital mode. They've been slowly making this move for a while now. I found it kinda funny... if I were to say take an mp3 file with musical content, and send that over to a friend via Packet, D-STAR, whatever... what's heard on the air isn't "music" by any means, but if you go by their view on HF digital voice, you would have to say that was an illegal music transmission. Then you go look at HF digital data, and see Pactor III an unpublished, non-reproducible format, but "loved" by Emergency Services volunteers for its ability to jam a frequency without listening for other modes/traffic... er, I mean... "get the messages through"... (sorry, my brainwashing isn't quite finished yet)... But that's okay to the FCC. The ONLY way to copy it is to own a $1000 product, that's not based on a published, reproducible specification... unlike D-STAR, I might add. I only share the above to point out that you *might* be wrong about what the FCC here in the States thinks about "legal ID's" on D-STAR. No one's asked them yet, and gotten anything in writing. The regs are so far behind technology at this point, they'll probably never be fixed. The last time someone asked a D-STAR question of an FCC representative, it turned into California going off and doing their own thing and the FCC making the relatively recent announcement that yes, a D-STAR repaeter *is* a repeater, and must therefore remain in the defined repeater sub-band in Part 97... that's only taken what... four years to sort out? Good luck getting an answer on legal digital/D-STAR ID's before the turn of the next decade. Everyone's OPINION is that both the callsign field and the packetized voice are legal. If you take the first away, the repeater's aren't legally ID'ing. If you take the second away, anyone with anything OTHER than their callsign in the field including those suffix characters someone else mentioned -- is hosed. It's a "can't win" situation for all. Meanwhile, I could put "NATE" both in my rigs and in my Gateway, and who'd stop me? And I could put "KAREN" in my wife's rig and in the Gateway too. If I were using it FIRST and another Nate came along... that'd be a bummer for me, but I could be NATE1 and he could be NATE2. Seriously -- you can keep arguing this from the perspective of "standards" all day. My POINT is and always has been, there's NOTHING to ENFORCE those policies other than peer pressure and probably some folks who'd take it upon themselves to "police" things with no charter or right to do so. I buy a rig, I can put whatever I want in that field. If I buy a Gateway, I didn't sign anything that said I couldn't put it in the database, either. Am I really going to DO any of it? NO. It's a hypothetical example. But a strong one. As a Gateway operator I might say "no" to some guy who wants to register "JOE", but you know out of hundreds of Gateways, some misfit group would eventually allow it. Think that one out to its logical conclusion... some guy now PAYS for his Gateway software, since it's a pay to play product, doesn't have to sign anything saying he'll follow ANY rules... and sues the snot out of Icom if the Trust Server team says "You can't register 'JOE'"... it *could* happen. And that again has been and will continue to be my point... in a source-routed system, using the callsign field as anything other than a routing address, will eventually be broken by someone, who'll gain followers, and then there will eventually be chaos... If we're taking "vanity" orders, I want "C182" for the plane I'm going to go fly this summer and forget all about ham radio and our utterly backward networks... that can't even encrypt real command and control functions so you can fix/maintain your infrastructure system from over-the-air. Even that's been broken though really... I don't think the DD module setup by default blocks port 443 or does any inspection to see if a payload is encrypted. I bet I can SSH from a laptop on an ID-1 to a machine halfway around the globe, making both my transmissions and the transmissions of the DD module, illegal here in the States. Just one more example of the regs being so far behind modern times, it's not even funny. The sidebar I was asked to write for the ARRL VHF/UHF Digital Communications Handbook about the use of encryption in Ham Radio, was just the regulatory tip of the iceberg. Callsigns in the right place in a packet, isn't even important enough to be on my radar. That's how much I don't care. Send me "BOB" for all I care... just sign in voice... doesn't bother me a bit. If you won't tell me your callsign in voice, I'll turn off the rig and not talk to you... but I really don't care what the screen on the radio says you are. The radios at least don't show anything if they miss the header. The stupid Gateway assumes you're the LAST guy to key up if it misses it. That's INCREDIBLY bad design on a source-routed network... but was the only way they could think of to handle mobile dropouts, I guess. The right way to handle it is to continously interleave the header/routing information throughout the entire transmission... but too late... D-STAR Protocol V2, maybe someday. Nate WY0X -- Nate Duehr n...@natetech.com
