There's little chance of D-Star repeaters replacing analog repeaters in northern California, and I suspect that's true in many places in the US. The voting members of our frequency coordination organization are people who have coordinated repeaters, and of course virtually all of those are analog repeaters. In parts of the region covered by this organization, and in particular, the greater San Francisco Bay Area, all available 2 meter pairs have been assigned, and in the same region, due to the Pave Paws military radar site, repeaters on the 70 cm band must run at unusably low power levels.
Recently the coordinators looked at several proposals to refarm 2 meters, to create parts of the band that could take advantage of narrow band modes (this would include D-Star). Some ideas were very carefully crafted to minimize the number of analog repeaters affected and how much the few that would need to move would have to move, to keep down costs. The voting members -- again made up almost entirely of people who run analog repeaters -- voted down all proposals, then passed another motion prohibiting the issue from being raised for three years. During the debate, when there were comments made about the large number of paper repeaters, or unused repeaters, or very lightly used analog repeaters, there were angry reactions that amounted to "I have this pair, and you can't take it away from me." I am sympathetic to one argument -- some repeaters exist for EmComm situations, and of course, for the occassional training nets. Those repeaters need to be available. But there seems no interest in sharing those pairs with other repeaters that might be more active, but which would shut down for EmComm training nets or actual emergencies. Bottom line -- in this area at least, coordinations will not be pulled from existing analog repeaters any time soon, no matter how little utilized they are. It's just the nature of the Bylaws of the frequency coordination organization about who gets to vote, and human nature to not want to change. Surprisingly, most of those people carry a digital radio around in their pocket each day, having replaced their analog cell phone with a digital one years ago. But digital for ham radio? -- No way. Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: davidscott_345 To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2010 10:24 AM Subject: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Are you exprerencing anti d-star in your area? I have listened to a couple of conversations on analog 2 meter repeaters here in Columbus, Ohio. The gist of the conversations seem to be we don't want d-star because they will lose their analog systems. After hearing this I checked the the 2007-2008 repeater directory. Taking into account machines I knew were no longer on the air I counted 16 2 meter machines and 22 440 Mhz machines in operation. There are two d-star systems in Columbus one went up on a new frequency pairs on 2m and 440. The other went up on existing 2m and 440 repeater pairs. I see that as a net loss to the analog folks as 1 2m and 1 440 pair. When I scan the local analog repeaters only a couple are used a lot. There are many that don't have any traffic on them for hours at a time. So what do they feel they are losing? I understand if it is not their cup of tea. I don't feel any hostility to CW ops or packet because I don't use those modes so why should they feel threatened by dstar. David Scott N8XYF
