Just for clarification. The reason that beaconing is not recommended on a D-STAR repeater is two fold:
If the repeater is linked, your beacon goes to everyone on the link, compounded if you are connected to a reflector Both in the case of the local repeater and through the gateway most people leave the "alert beep" active on their radios, and every time a radio beacons they get a beep, multiply that by 20 or 30 radios on the repeater or 100 on a group of repeaters on a reflector and that gets to be very irritating. Remember, D-PRS™ is not APRS, and the channel you are using for GPS or DATA will "tie-up" the frequency for the beacon transmission. Plus the voice users will not hear anything during the beacon and may transmit on top of it, especially since most people don't use the automatic transmit inhibit function (blocking PTT when there is a signal on frequency) and even if they did, it would be awfully irritating to keep getting a "channel busy" beep every time you keyed the mike because there were a bunch of beacons running. You can have, and I like it when people do have, the GPS reporting on PTT. I would say 99% of the time, a beacon is not needed, a quick PTT to report your position is sufficient. I say "KD7CAO what is your location?" -- you key the mike and release, report complete. Even better, you can have autoreply turned on, with a status message, I callsign route to you, and your radio automatically responds. I may not want my wife to worry I'm at McDonald's. With a beacon she can see that's where I am -- if I don't have a beacon, I just don't key the radio while in the vicinity! :) D-PRS is a Trademark of Icom America. On Jul 17, 2009, at 2:36 PM, Eric Gildersleeve wrote: > Even our EM partners here locally don't see the need for the GPS > Microphone since we aren't allowed to use the beacon feature through > our Gateways! Grrr Arghh this creates problems for me monthly since > people want these features to work but, are being blocked from time > to time. > > Anyways, if I were you I'd just buy the IC-91AD, get the RS-91 > Software and don't forget the Drop-In Charger. With this setup you > can't go wrong! > > 73 > > Eric KD7CAO > > John Hays Amateur Radio: K7VE [email protected] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Please TRIM your replies or set your email program not to include the original message in reply unless needed for clarity. ThanksYahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dstar_digital/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dstar_digital/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[email protected] mailto:[email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
