John and Charles pretty much answered your questions. To me, the key point is that G4ULF's software has been accepted by the US Trust team to be fully G2 compatible, and that he has tested his code with Fred's firmware (says so on his blog site), so you have a choice of boards and firmware.
This free software and inexpensive node adapter board do save money, but as you know, all the repeater RF issues have to be addressed. The good news is with this approach, you can employ an analog radio that you may be able to get quite inexpensively, as long as it allows or you can get directly to the discriminator output and the modulator, bypassing filtering. And as you've already noted, you can typically adjust the deviation down to what other ICOM D-Star radios expect. Jim - K6JM ----- Original Message ----- From: Charles Scott To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2010 1:54 PM Subject: Re: [DSTAR_DIGITAL] Looking for D-Star UHF Repeater/Controller Jim: Interesting. I'm somewhat familiar with the hot spots, but didn't realize it was going this far. So, if I have this right, what's needed is the GMSK node adapter board, a repeater, and a computer. At that point, and with the NI-Star software when that's released, we would have the same functionality as the Icom repeater, controller, and gateway computer, right--and then some? I have two Vertex VXR5000's I could do this with. Neither are narrow-band right now. I could mod them without too much trouble but I probably don't have to do that unless I get moved to a narrow pair assignment. Has anyone used a VXR5000 for this? Chuck - N8DNX On 8/26/2010 3:42 PM, J. Moen wrote: If you haven't already, I'd recommend you consider the non-ICOM approach, which will allow you to save significant money. This would be using a gmsk modem or Node Adapter board to interface between the server and an analog radio. The boards are in the US $100 - $150 range. For initial testing, you could start out with DVAR Hot Spot by KB9KHM in full duplex repeater mode. This supports DPlus but not callsign routing and runs only on Windows. Soon to be released is Dave Lake G4ULF's NI-Star software, which has been tested and accepted by the US Trust team to be fully G2 compliant. It runs on Linux, typically CentOS, and repeaters running it during the careful test phase typically run the other standard applications like Dplus, DPRS/D-Star Monitor, etc. without modification. David's blog at http://g4ulf.blogspot.com/ says they are now working on packaging and documentation, and that release is "imminent." The first repeater up and running was GB7MH in Sept 2009 as reported by the RSGB RadCom magazine Feb 2010. One of the most recent to come online is WG2MSK. See http://www.sidigital.org/ Once NI-Star is officially released, I expect to see many more new D-Star repeaters brought up with considerable savings compared to the ICOM only installation. Jim - K6JM
