Callsign routing is analogous to direct dialing. On a phone you
dial 999-555-1234 and you don't know if the party at the other end is
on a call or not (or if the "party line" is busy). If they don't have
call waiting you get a busy tone, if they have call waiting you create
an interruption to their current conversation to let them know someone
is calling.
People are too anal about not having their radio contacts
"interrupted" --- life is full of "interruptions" --- you just have to
deal with it. There are rude and intentional interruptions, which
none of us appreciate, then there are circumstantial and random
interruptions that might be necessary and good.
Now that there are options on gateway technology, including open
source, better signaling could be built into the gateway to minimize
interruptions and have the calling station know what was happening.
(e.g. key mike, listen for a "busy" signal.)
DPLUS (and DEXTRA) are over utilized because many local repeater
communities are small, so we hook them up to a conference bridge to
generate activity. They really should be used for established nets
and/or regional coverage.
Every D-STAR user should absolutely know and regularly use callsign
routing. You should see the flurry of traffic on the gateway manager's
list (and sometimes here) when a reflector server goes down. Nobody
knows how to use their radios without the dplus crutch. Let's pretend
that a regular net was held on REF055C (another silliness the "A",
"B", "C", just give the reflector a number or name, they don't have
modules) and that server went down. Individual stations could
callsign route to a network manager and find out where the net was
meeting during the outage.
Or your buddy normally checks into a certain reflector, but he has
moved off to another reflector, or none at all -- if he has his radio
on and has keyed up on a gateway -- just callsign route to him. (Say
you had urgent traffic for him and ham radio was his only contact
method).
ircddb is "Trust Server" agnostic and updates gateways in seconds
(usually before the PTT is released). If we could eliminate user
radio registration, then the "Trust Server" model could go away except
for network attached devices (DV Dongles, DVAP, HotSpot, Gateways) and
users could just communicate.
On Jul 30, 2010, at 9:41 AM, Ted Wrobel wrote:
At the risk of drawing this into a flame war, it is my opinion that
call sign routing is an idea whose time will never come in a public
network. It suffers a fatal flaw in that is is entirely ignorant of
remote repeater activity and thus prohibits any attemp at etiquette.
Since there is no way to know even what repeater you are being
directed to, and that there is no way to monitor that repeater even
if you did, there is no way to be polite with call sign routing.
The only hope is that the repeater will ignore a message if it is
busy at some instant - and I'm not convinced that it does.
Call sign routing appears to me much akin to the old party-line
telephone system with the exception that no one can tell when the
line is busy.
Frankly, Dplus is a far superior solution to remote contacts (In my
opinon, of course).
73
Ted
W1GRI
John D. Hays
Amateur Radio Station K7VE
PO Box 1223
Edmonds, WA 98020-1223 VOIP/SIP: [email protected]
