On Jul 12, 2010, at 2:02 AM, Nate Duehr wrote: > All it takes to grow D-STAR (or any other new mode in any particular area) is > time and money... D-STAR has flourished in some areas due to massive influxes > of taxpayer dollars in the form of government grants... some local, some > Federal. in other areas, it's alive but weak... and in still others, it's not > doing anything at all.
Clarification: This was meant to be worded in such a way as to say it's very much flourishing in some areas, mediocre in others, and low in still others. And of course, there's also places where it's flourishing where large sums of personal monies have been spent on it, not just the government money areas... that sentence was badly worded. The point here was... it takes a lot of $ to change out infrastructure, no matter what mode or type it is... and in a recession, it's not going to grow at super-fast rates in most areas, but in areas where there's interest/money to do it, it took off, for sure. Once someone buys/builds the infrastructure, users show up at a pretty good clip, usually. Then it tapers off. I see about 4 registration requests a month in the area now. We're one of the "medium interest/money" areas, and it wouldn't have really gotten off the ground without donated repeaters to kick-start it. That led to some locals donating a few thousand dollars worth of duplexer, feedline, antennas, and tower space. Now there's a couple more on the air. One off of grant money, two privately funded... It still doesn't have a ton of "traction", but we do have over 100 registered users... so we're square in the middle of the bell-curve. Basically growth of repeater networks comes down to either having a "sugar-daddy" who'll buy a lot of stuff... or government money... or a large enough club/organization to "spread the load" of the up-front infrastructure costs... once that part's handled, it's just about time and effort to get it on the air. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X n...@natetech.com
