Hello, Driving around town yesterday day I happened to hear a JA7 station calling "CQ Cleveland, CQ Cleveland..." I thought this was in response to my "KG8IU listening, Cleveland Ohio" call about a minute before. Perhaps he heard the "Cleveland" but not the call sign, something like that. Anyway, the local WB8THD C node is normally linked to REF001C, so while certainly interesting, DX wasn't unheard of. Over the next 10 minutes or so I heard him a few more times. It seemed like he wasn't hearing my replies.
So I had a thought. Perhaps he wasn't on the reflector, but he was routing to /WB8THDC. "CQ Cleveland" would make a lot more sense in that case. I've had an 880 for near two months now but until yesterday I hadn't had need of the RX>CS key. I tried it, verified his callsign was in the UR field, and called him back. This time he heard me, and we had a nice QSO. I didn't think to check the RPT1 and RPT2 fields. I imagine RPT1 was still my normal "WB8THD C", but what of RPT2? In all the domestic examples I've seen, this is set to the ".. G" callsign. Is that appropriate for basic callsign routing as well? Or, was there likely something more specific to him? I do know he was on a dongle. Now, the main question. It is my understanding that in a dplus-style reflector link anything that hits the local port is also linked to the reflector. If that's the case, did the JA7 station's "CQ Cleveland" calls make it into the reflector? Did my transmissions after I hit the RX>CS key? If so, perhaps someone heard it. I think it was during the 9 o'clock hour EDT. He did make a comment that many North American stations "don't know how to contact Japanese station". I can conclude only that we simply don't use callsign routing much, so we don't know how to answer Japanese stations that do. In his short message he did have something to the effect of "CAPTURE CALLSIGN..", something he mentioned in his audio as well. It took me a bit to come up with what that might translate to, but I think RX>CS was the key. Any thoughts? Thanks, Jeff KG8IU
