I have used SCOM in the past (5Ks) and bought a 7330 over a year ago.
The 7330 is hands down the nicest piece of hardware I've ever seen in
a repeater controller (just like the old ones were), but the software
was seriously lacking, and after waiting over six months and seeing
only very limited movement, I finally bailed out of it. While
incredibly powerful, SCOM software is rather complex since "common
functions" are built up from many smaller macros. When it was stable
and fully-functional, this was just a case of "more hassle programming
for more powerful features in the end", but due to the extremely long
development cycle (years in beta?) I had to jump ship. With that said,
I understand that Bob and co. at SCOM have "day jobs" and things take
priority. If the 7330 software is ever fully completed, the controller
will be a force to be reckoned with.
Having owned/used LinkComm, SCOM, FF-Systems, CAT, ACC, Zetron (yeah,
not a ham controller, but they work and are bulletproof) and Arcom.
All of the controllers are good. Every controller builder has a niche,
and a reason why they decided to build a controller. I doubt any of
them did it for the money, so they obviously had (good) ideas about
how to do things differently. I would try to figure out what the
particular repeater system and community of operators/users needs (and
expects) from the system and match the controller that way.
73 DE N0MJS
On Aug 4, 2008, at 9:43 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
At 8/3/2008 22:35, you wrote:
> On a quick look at the available controllers around the SCOM 7330
looks
> like a fairly new kid on the block. I wonder if anyone has had any
> experience with this model or SCOM as a whole? -Mike
I maintain 2 systems using 7330s, & I'm quite impressed. Right now
there's
a firmware issue that causes one of the 3 ports to lock up. I think
this
has hit only a couple of the many they've sold so far (including one
of
mine, but fortunately the locked port is ununsed), so it's pretty
rare but
that also probably why they're having trouble fixing it. I understand
they're very close to a fix for that plus a firmware update, which
will
come with many new features. The last beta firmware release appears
to be
immune to this problem, so if you're really worried about the slim
chance
of a lockup you can have that version loaded until the next release.
Bob NO6B
--
Cort Buffington
H: +1-785-838-3034
M: +1-785-865-7206
