I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the East Bay near Mt Diablo. We have several DStar repeaters in the area, but my location is low and the closest one, K6MDD, has a great signal but my house happens to be in just the wrong place for multipath, R2D2, etc.
So I got the NQSMHS board from Mark G7LTT/NI2O, firmware from Fred PA4YBR and put up Mark McGregor's DVAR Hot Spot in simplex mode. I mostly stay connected to K6MDD C, since I talk to those guys when mobile. Works great. I am running about 5 watts into a fairly low antenna, since I don't need a lot of range. I use a 91AD HT to talk to my hotspot. The K6MDD repeater, which was put up by Tim Barrett, K6BIV, recently passed the milestone of registering its 300th user. Saturday night some of the gang got together for dinner to celebrate the success of K6MDD and DStar in the Bay Area. I was asked to bring along my "hot spot" and demo it. Gene, W6JMP, did an interesting demo. He set up a Netbook with Verizon Aircard and demo'd the DVAP. He uses this setup in his car, since he has a long commute during which he's in and out of range of DStar repeaters, but he has nearly continuous internet from the Aircard. For my demo, I used Gene's broadband internet via WiFi so DVAR Hot Spot could connect to K6MDD C. The demo went well. I was pushing the "access point" functionality that I'm using, but it came out this technology could be used to convert an existing analog repeater, perhaps one that isn't seeing much use, into a Dplus linking DStar repeater. My other message was really how easy this stuff is. I had expected a week or two of trail and error configuring and testing. I was shocked it basically all worked the first time. Good hardware, good firmware, good PC software, plus leveraging Dplus. We had a great dinner, and I got some nice feedback on the presentation. I believe even more now that the creative non-ICOM work going on is starting a second wave of DStar growth, and ICOM and dealers will make more money from it all by selling more DStar radios. Jim - K6JM
