In the UK, Icom sold their repeaters at a subsidised rate in the early days. I doubt they made much money on them, not sure what the position was in other parts of the world, but I’m guessing it was similar. They no longer need to sell Repeaters at low/subsidised cost. There are now so many other alternatives to buying an “Icom Repeater”, for a lot less money than even the subsidised offer they had in the very early days, that they don’t need to rely on Repeater sales to generate revenue. The more “third party” options that are available to get your repeater on-air, the happier Icom are. They still are the only manufacturer selling radios, so the increase in repeaters (Icom or third party) drives sales of their various Icom DStar Radios. It reminds me a little of Kenwoods domination of the APRS market which they had for years until (I think) one of their engineers went to Yaesu, and now Yaesu have started selling some good APRS radios too.
As far as all the DStar Haters are concerned, why even get bothered by it? Isn’t it the same in every mode in this hobby, there are always those who feel compelled to be the “Anti Whatever Mode” people. Generally people who have come to a decision despite the fact that they probably never even tried the mode. If they did try it and still don’t like it – fine! Who cares, leave them to it. The best thing you can do is look at putting up a “third party” repeater in your area. Its not that expensive by comparison to the Icom route (forgive me, I don’t know your personal circumstances, and I’m always happy to spend other peoples money). As the movie said – “if you build it they will come”. In any event, my guess is that Icom are very happy. Dex M0TMX From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Chris Fowler Sent: 24 July 2010 18:00 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Re: Are you exprerencing anti d-star in your area? On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 01:37 +0000, Tom J wrote: > > I'll tell you what i don't understand. iCOM has the corner on the > market as far as radios with out of the box DSTAR. Why they don't > encourage and/or provide repeater equipment at low cost to sell more > radios is beyond me. There are companies that make sister boards for > non-iCOM transceivers - or instructions for making them yourself. So > existing radios could be made to work with DSTAR as well. > I believe you may see this happening where the market makes sense. In large metropolitan areas with a lot of hams. If I was ICOM I would donate repeaters to clubs that had real deployment plans in hopes of selling more radios. As others start producing D-Star hardware this type of investment will make less sense. It is easy for me to give you a repeater when I also am the only one selling D-Star solutions. What you should try is to call up ICOM if your club is working on a plan and ask for a substantial discount. You can also make a case of how many members are in your club and how many may purchase radios. If the numbers make sense you'll may get a discount or even a donation. I've always said that to sell D-Star all you need to do is "sell" ARES. Once you do that you'll get greater adoption from ARES members who want the same thing as their group wants. You can then work on the hams that are not ARES members or work on individual clubs. At least with the repeater ICOM has got the ball moving (very fast). I just wished the 10Ghz hardware was 10% of what it retails for. That would help silence those that say "but the Internet is not reliable". Bert: I've never been a hater :) There were just certain things I did not like, and still don't, about D-Star. You take the good with the bad and just enjoy it. I used to complain about the expense but I've gotten over that mess. I don't really think D-Star is that much more expensive than anything else in this or other hobbies. We have people that want to buy Mototrbo digital radios and experiment with those. A used HT is about the same price as a new 91AD. Look in any old QST (with the back catalog) and run those numbers through the online inflation calculator and you'll realize we don't really pay a lot for our gear. We get a lot of value for our dollars. Chris k4fh
