I've been following this discussion with interest because I've dealt
with it myself and have been chasing after a solution for some time.
I have noticed that this is a common problem in today's world. Many of
the people I've dealt with in IT have had religious commitments to a
particular operating system or environment and to them anything else was
sacrilege. We see all around us today how people have a religious
commitment to a particular political ideology to the extent that facts
and history are irrelevant. We can get philosophical and discuss things
like epistemology to understand the problem better, but in the end it
simply is what it is.
As far as D-Star goes, I've tried explaining away each objection and the
detractor just finds another problem. I finally gave up trying to
convince individuals. The one thing that has made a difference though is
to just keep telling people how much fun I'm having with it and to keep
talking about it in club meetings.
The Atlanta Radio Club has been involved in D-Star from the beginning,
but many of our members have been detractors from the beginning. After
several years of just continuing to talk about it, people who had
avoided D-Star have started asking questions about it. We started
announcing D-Star nets on our weekly analog net. Some of those
detractors will never come on board, but some are objecting less and
less and some have gotten involved in D-Star. (Some even drank the
Kool-Aid.)
I think the key is to just keep telling people how much fun it is and
what it can do. Some of them will get interested, others won't and
that's consistent with everything else in Ham Radio.
Bert Bruner
KE4FOV
