I agree, those that sit in front of a PC all day without RF are not 'radio' amateurs.
The thing about D-Star IS the connectivity, its no different nowadays than having electricity at a site really, the internet is a utility and almost available everywhere, like roads and fuel, so used in its proper place, nobody should have a problem recognising it as long as its not the main reason we have it. We all appreciate street lighting, but don't moan that its using electricity after all. (If you see where I'm coming from.) A lot of packet backbones went over to the internet for reliability and security, it didn't kill the mode, although we have stepped in at a later stage with D-Star here, lets not take a step backwards. 73 de Neil G7EBY. ----- Original Message ----- From: David Holman To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 8:16 PM Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: New guy I play with DStar and have played with it in a number of environments. I think that DStar is awesome, but we (the hams) really need to pry ICOM's icy grip off of it. The system is awesome, but the fact that no other manufacturers will play in this game is bad. I am not much of a dongle supporter because we are "radio" amateurs, not "internet" amateurs. The internet is a great thing, but we should not become dependent on it, and that is what the dongle does. We need to figure out how to set up an RF network that will support routing of the DStar transmissions and move away from the internet. Again, that would require us to pry ICOM's icy grip off DStar. I am not sure how to do that. I will leave that up to people much smarter than me. 73 David, AC7DS
