On 24 Sep 2010 16:34:08 GMT
Rob wrote:

Yeti wrote:
On 24/09/2010 17:22, Brian Reay wrote:

Amateur radio has many facets, DStar is simply one of them. Why
can't people be left to enjoy their pet facets while others get on
and enjoy theirs?


Because D-Star isn't amateur radio.

There is no experimentation involved, and can't be.

Over here it is probably the mode with the most experimentation going
on in ham radio today...

Of couse not with the codec.
But in any communication system there are things that cannot be
changed or incompatability would result.
That does not mean there cannot be experiments elsewhere in the
system, or in the application of the system as a whole.

Remember packet. The AX.25 protocol was open, but it could not
really be changed because that would break compatability between the
many implementations that existed after some time. It was very
clear that a couple of critical mistakes were made in the design, and
there were proposals on how to fix them, but they never took off as
it simply wasn't practical to change AX.25
It really made no difference if it was open or closed, it was
unchangable anyway.

Yet, amateurs used it as a black-box building block in many
applications and experimented a lot with it.

And ultimately it failed (what's left of the packet network is a shadow
of what it was) because of that lack of flexibility.

Amateur radio has a difficult-to-overcome problem in that we always
build systems from the bottom up and don't design in the features that
allow growth and variation. D-STAR is another example of a system that
shares that same fault.

I hope that it's possible to create something that doesn't have these
limitations, provides better function and allows more experimentation
with all aspects of the technology.

--

Brian Morrison