On Sep 11, 2008, at 9:15 PM, TGundo 2003 wrote: > As long as were at it, I'll pose this question: Your mission- Spend > grant money on a brand new repeater with the requirement it needs to > support P25 but operate mixed mode. What would you use?
Quantar seems to do pretty well for those I've listened/talked through. The analog audio is "distinctively Motorola" though, highly compressed and if you swept it, there's no way it'd be flat in-to- out. Moto sure likes their compression. Maybe it was just the way the owner had the S-Com 7K interfaced to the Quantar, I don't know. He's the only guy independently wealthy enough to have bought a Quantar around here, so it's hard to say! (GRIN) The rest of us are using MASTR II and Kenwood analog machines, even the clubs! Oh before I forget to joke about it... of course you could always give the grant money back and ask that they return it as a tax refund to those who are really paying for the repeater. :-) (Heh heh. Nothing's really FREE! Someone paid for it.) You didn't say specifically that it was a ham repeater, but so many ham groups seem to be running on DHS money these days, you'd think we were in Soviet Russia at the peak of their Socialistic spending spree. Ha. Okay, back to the repeater... Mixed mode was shut off on one of the locally busy VHF machines that had it on for a while for mixed P25 and analog access. Analog users still in this day and age couldn't be coaxed into FINALLY turning on their CTCSS decode feature (or they still didn't have such a feature) and were constantly keying up in the middle of P25 QSO's... "Hey, is there a control operator around? Is anyone hearing all this noise coming through the repeater?" We all had to keep an analog rig on in the background turned down low to listen for this (otherwise we didn't know why our P25 conversation was all of a sudden just HAMMERED and we couldn't talk to each other all of a sudden) and explain YET AGAIN to whoever popped up each time P25 traffic was going on... that it was digital P25 traffic and nothing to worry about, turn on your CTCSS decoder, etc... this always turned into the analog user wanting to strike up a 10 minute conversation with whoever had taken it upon themselves to say (on P25): "Hey guys, we're getting hammered by another confused analog user. Hang on, I'll go tell him what's going on." And then by the time the "analog explanation" conversation on analog had ended, everyone was listening on analog anyway... they'd gone and grabbed their analog rigs, if they didn't have them on to monitor for the mixed-mode problem to begin with. (Some P25 rigs can switch between analog and digital, so those users could hear what was going on, and flip their memory channel to the one that would TRANSMIT in analog and start this "education process"... but not all can do it.) Then we'd go back to P25 and joke about how it had happened ... AGAIN... Usually this interloper/education session would have broken up the conversation enough that we'd all forget what we were originally talking about, and end up signing off and forgetting about P25 on that system for the night... And we'd do it again a few days or so later... My opinion now that I've "been there, done that"? Mixed mode is a huge pain in the ass. Build an analog machine or a digital one, and go with one or the other. :-) I'm also convinced that with the current state of development, D-STAR is WAY ahead of the functionality of P25 in Amateur Radio, since a D- STAR repeater with an Internet connection, a $200 Gateway software package and a relatively cheap PC is INSTANTLY part of a world-wide callsign-routed linking system. Amateur P25 has a lot of hurdles to jump through before systems can even think about doing that. Someone will say I'm just a "D-STAR Fan-Boy" for saying that, but it's true... if you put a table of features together and lay them side by side, like you'd buy a car or any other consumer product... P25 Amateur looks pretty shabby feature-wise, compared to current D-STAR systems with Gateway 2.0, D-Plus Linking, all the specialized PC/Mac/ Linux software for doing low-speed data applications, etc... On one of the popular D-STAR Nets tonight, I was asked to talk about D- RATS, an open-source software package that does a TON of stuff, all on the "low-speed data" built-in serial ports on the D-STAR rigs. Another guy running D-RATS at his home station was able to see in real- time as I was talking (in voice) my GPS data from my Jeep and know that I was 931 miles from him, traveling 45 MPH on I-25 in Denver, on a map on his PC screen, while I was "presenting" to the Net about what D-RATS would do, feature-wise, in voice. I wasn't running D-RATS, it'll display the GPS data from any D-STAR rig, whether one with a built-in GPS, or like me... the "cheap" way, a serial cable from my old Garmin GPS-V and the ID-800H in the Jeep. And the author Dan Smith, made D-RATS open-source... anyone can send him code to make it do virtually anything, if they want to. He adds features faster than I can download and test versions! I noticed the guys at dstarusers.org added some live "growth graphs" recently: http://www.dstarusers.org/dsm_growth.html Kinda nifty. 864 unique callsigns heard in the last 24 hours on all of the Gateway- equipped D-STAR repeaters (there are repeaters without Gateways, but that's considerably less fun): http://www.dstarusers.org/lastheard.php So... seriously... think about going D-STAR. Amateur P25 is fun/ good... I won't knock that... but D-STAR is light years ahead of it in functionality... I'm not saying everything's "perfect", there are glitches to all this new stuff... but dollar for dollar, the D-STAR gear is doing a lot more already. -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [EMAIL PROTECTED]
