At 04:01 PM 7/8/2009, you wrote: >Ben, > >Only you can really answer your question, but let me pose a question for >you to think about. What if you deployed to a major incident (like >Katrina) in an area where D-STAR has been deployed heavily for Emergency >Communications, would you want your options for support limited by not >having D-STAR in your bag of tricks?
I for one would agree that D-STAR would be a useful addition to any emergency communications setup. My list of equipment to be considered for emergency deployment includes 2m/70cm mobile FM transceiver and antenna IC-91AD and 2m amp (this combination will give around 50W Tx power on 2m) and antenna HF transceiver, tuner and inverted V antenna Embedded Echolink node (in case I get deployed to an adjacent unaffected area to setup links) 3G mobile router (for use with Echolink node) Batteries and chargers The D-STAR in the mix has a few uses. Firstly, if there's an incident within range of an existing gateway, D-STAR can be used directly. Also, there is a portable gateway in VK3, which could be deployed. Finally, D-STAR is proving itself as extremely good on marginal paths (outperforming FM by a fair margin), so it could be used for some fairly long or difficult point to point links that would be marginal at beast on FM. Current procedures here would favour the FM and/or HF radios, but if a situation called for D-STAR, and there were skilled D-STAR operators available, I wouldn't hesitate to use it. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
