Nate WY0X wrote: "The guy asked if you could run D-STAR Gateways on wimpy computers."
No, N9HSM's question was simply "I got a question How [far] can you be be from the Dstar repeater before you drop out? or How close the Dstar has to be before you can get into." I do agree with Nate's point that we don't have an agreed-upon way to measure and answer the question rigorously. My answer was certainly subjective, though based on real experiences, but certainly not based on engineering measurements. In business, the decision maker frequently cannot get quality engineering data to help make a decision, and is forced to figure out what experts "feel" is the answer based in their own experience. We are kind of in that postion here. I don't think we'll steer N9HSM too far wrong if we say D-STAR is about as good, and some claim somewhat better than, analog FM. I would add that D-STAR is somewhat worse than FM when experiencing multipath. N9HSM further said: "The closer Dstar is about 50 to 75 miles away. I have a beam." Based on my experience, I would not bank on being able to make the repeater 75 miles away. It might be possible, depending on a lot of things. But if I knew N9HSM, I'd advise him to get both a D-STAR radio and a Hotspot or DVAP, and starting talking to other D-STAR users on the DPlus network. Over time, he might get interested in setting up his own D-STAR repeater, or helping others set one up nearby. Then his D-STAR radio could work directly into that repeater. Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: Nate Duehr To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 2:01 AM Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: Dstar <snip> The guy asked if you could run D-STAR Gateways on wimpy computers. The answer is yes, but not well. The simple answer was right there in the manual. Run the manufacturer's recommended system or higher performance. The discussion is related to how to figure out how to do it if one's really in dire need of doing so. That said, the vast majority of us don't need such under-powered hardware wasting our time, but we're pointing the direction to figure it out. Lots of tools, no time to screw with it. Teach a man to fish... Let me repeat: iostat, netstat, sar, top, nice, etc. All commands where anyone with the time and patience to do so, can completely profile the applications running on a D-STAR gateway. Most of those have been around for about 20 years on Unix-like operating systems, and are well-documented. The "art" of system profiling and tweaking isn't quite so well documented, but it's out there in mailing lists like this one. Discussed and debated by hundreds of Unix admins for years until some best practices have been defined, but not really written down in too many places for Unix, and even less for Linux. <snip>
