Please see my notes in-between you questions, and welcome to the Digital World! I'm busy scraping together money for a D-STAR radio. Someone has loaned me a dongle, and I've been playing around with that. I'm reading up on D-STAR as much as I can. I have a couple questions:
I've read about the various Trust Servers, and I'm curious how it all works. I read that there is such a thing as a "multi-trust" gateway, which can't communicate with a gateway using the K5TIT Trust Server. I also read that there is some work-around so that Japanese stations and US stations (and presumably stations on gateways in other countries that use the K5TIT Trust Server) can talk. This work around is specific between the USROOT and Japan ROOT. Not a concern for any user, as this is an ICOM proprietary thing between the two servers... There is no real documented manuals or wiki's on a TRUST SERVER. Just is what it is. Is there a list somewhere of the other major Trust Servers, and what countries they serve, and whether they have agreements with the K5TIT Trust Server? Mainly I'm just curious about which gateways I can talk to, and which I can't. (I heard about the unique situation in France.) There are SPLINTER GROUPS, groups that choose not to be on the USROOT network, and then those who are. Those who are part of the USROOT "tree" can be found on dstarusers.org. There are two other groups that are out there, but since your asking on DSTAR, I will focus on this grouping. The others allow PBX, Analog interface, and or other forms of external connections to the dstar data protocol. IN A NUT SHELL: cross connections ARE out there, but 98% of the USROOT admins are vigorous about maintaining per DSTAR signals over injections from Analog (hang timers, and other sounds...) By the way try sending a sound over digital that is not created by the originating radio like a 1k Hz tone, and you will have a tone that just went into a blender for wild ride.... My next question concerns D-STAR reflectors. I know that reflectors are made possible by DPlus, thanks to Robin AA4RC. I presume that these reflectors are just computers in server rooms with good internet connections, and that a reflector doesn't have to be connected to an ID-RP2C repeater controller. I'm curious, is there a list of who sponsors and pays for these reflectors? It must be expensive to keep a colocated server going, and I would like to know whom to thank. MOST of these people do it out of the respect to Amateur Radio, and are also HAMS themselves. (They lurk on this group) In a nutshell, the reflectors or on 10Mbps on up to DS3 / OC3, and a couple are even so high up the food chain, they sit literally on two 3Terabps fibers with OC128 redundancy, "Chicogo" and Dallas. The two and maybe a third UK reflectors sit on 100Mbps fibers. Yes, collocated in Datacenters, these machines are not your homebrew slap together blade servers... Expense... I can not answer that other then YES, someone has to foot the bill.... 73, - Rob W7GH Back to you Rob.... Evans F. Mitchell KD4EFM / WQFK-894 Fla. D-Star Tech Support Group http://www.florida-dstar.info <http://www.florida-dstar.info/> Polk ARES A.E.C. http://www.polkemcomm.org <http://www.polkemcomm.org/> BB8330 PIN: 30965B58
