I pretty much agree with all that. Purpose for this note is Tony's final tag "Horses for courses."
>From the context I guessed what it means, but I looked it up to verify. >usingenglish.com says "Horses for courses means that what is suitable for one >person or situation might be unsuitable for another." Learning English in midwestern US as I did, I'd never heard that phrase. We do typically use "Different strokes for different folks," "One size does not fit all" and "To each his own." But I like the term Tony used, which apparently is derived from British horse racing and was first used in the 1890s. Thanks for giving me that learning opportunity. Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: Tony Langdon To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 12:56 PM Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] linked reflector + traditional callsign routing <snip> ircddb is certainly a huge improvement that makes callsign routing much more useful. However, I beg to differ as to how much traction it would gin in the long run. I see that callsign routing often suits a different scenario to what most hams actually do. Callsign routing is at its best in a one on one scenario, especially when you're looking for a specific station (and even more so if ircddb is in use). However, many hams use wide area repeater networks for nets and ragchewing. For these applications, callsign routing is usually inferior to DPlus reflectors. Normal callsign routing doesn't really accommodate (say) a net involving 3 or more gateways (where do you direct UR to so that everyone can hear you? Sure, there is the multicast feature, which is designed to do this, but this has two serious limitations in my book: 1. It requires administrator intervention on all participating gateways to setup. This is the big show stopper in my book, it lacks flexibility. Doable here in Australia, where the WIA runs most of the gateways, but bugging administrators in this way is not what most end users want to do, just to run a net, especially when it's a simple matter to link to a reflector (and for courtesy, ask ONE person, rather than several if they can hold their net there). 2. It puts demand on the upstream bandwidth of gateways. In most installations, this is the biggest bandwidth limitation, and not all gateways will comfortable support the upstream data rate (obviously those running DD ports _should_ be OK, unless running heavy DD activity at the same time). DPlus reflectors are generally installed in data centres with good bandwidth available. Horses for courses. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
