Paul Plack wrote: > This is an interesting debate. Anyone who builds a repeater finds > satisfaction when it attracts a community of users - "A warm heatsink is > a happy heatsink." But many users seem to favor repeaters with little > traffic, allowing unobtrusive monitoring for their friends.
One way to accomodate both is fancy CTCSS schemes, or in the case of D-STAR, the coded squelch features. If you want to hear, you do... if you don't you don't, but you leave the rig on for calls -- which seems to be the important distinction in today's day and age where we have so many "noisemakers" that a lot of people only turn on the rig to make that one call, and then turn it back off. > Low usage is a time bomb in an age of growing demand for bandwidth. IRLP > could be one answer, but the reflectors seem to attract lots of chatter > which isn't very interesting to hear. I've turned the rig off many times > when I heard hams swapping S-meter reports. Hahahah... yes, dumb conversations and GOOD conversations both go with the territory of busy linked systems. Can't avoid it. We recently had some "controversy" here about that, and asked the groups wanting "quiet" and "noise" to split up... different repeaters for the different personality types. Me personally, I'll listen to anything -- if I *really* don't want to listen I know where the OFF button is. But my wife can attest (and maybe this is due to my multi-tasking ways with radios in airplane cockpits for a long time), I can have the commercial broadcast radio on, a ham repeater, a phone call going, and still able to be "interrupt driven" if something more important signals for my attention. (My wife on the other hand, can not... and no matter how hard you shake her, jump up and down, scream or otherwise... if she's on the phone, you can't stop her and update her with updated information for the person who she's talking to. She simply can't do it. You'll end up telling her, "I TRIED TO GET YOUR ATTENTION" and she'll have to call the person back. She wouldn't make a very good 911 dispatcher! GRIN...) > IRLP could be really neat for special interest nets. I've often thought > it would be great to have something equivalent to the old ECARS 40m net > for mobiles. I'd welcome the company when driving long distances at night. Yes, all the linked systems are great for that type of thing but rarely is it done. There are Nets about talking, but few nets about specific technical topics or ham activities on the Reflectors. I always thought the Houston AMSAT Net would be an excellent one to find on both IRLP and EchoLink... if you had enough volunteers around to knock the nodes offline who can't get their keying/ID's right. > I suppose APRS will have to become more fully developed before we'll be > able to easily find nets while transient. APRS is the "continuous net", it's always there on 144.39 in most metropolitan areas -- what do you mean? It's not really designed for a round-table, really. > Perhaps this will be the real "killer app" for D*. A mobile net that > utilizes automated frequency-hopping to work like satellite broadcast > radio on long drives would be awesome. Frequency hopping is easy to do manually, but it doesn't require D-STAR for that... just enough repeaters on the same network/reflector/conference along your route, or capable of being linked as you go. We have truck drivers here in Colorado that link the various IRLP machines together or to a Reflector as they drive around the state late at night... it works fine. That's not a "Net" per se, but there's no reason they couldn't expand it to the "Late Night Truck Drivers Conference", easily... if they wanted to. I've often wondered how to move THIS conversation -- REPEATER Builders/Geeks... to a known meeting place on-air. Wouldn't this discussion be more interesting in person with voices? :-) Nate WY0X
