Dave Platt wrote:
In article ,
Phil Kane wrote:


According to what I've heard, that's a "hot button" topic, but Bill
Cross of the FCC (an active ham) said at Dayton that he applies the
"duck test" to the D-Star repeaters (making them eligible for
automatic control).

That makes good sense to me.

As I understand it, some D-Star advocates are claiming that a D-Star
repeater isn't a repeater, because the regs state that a repeater
retransmits the incoming signal "instantaneously", and the packet
delay in a D-Star system makes it not-instantaneous... that it's
fundamentally a store-and-forward system, more like a BBS (albeit with
a very short storage time).

One B too many IMO! ;^)



That same line of thought (if valid) would seem to apply to a fairly
high percentage of ham-radio analog repeaters on the air today. It's
quite common to have a digital or bucket-brigate delay device in the
receiver audio path, with the analog audio being presented to the
repeater controller and transmitter some time (up to tens of
milliseconds) after it was actually demodulated by the receiver. This
can help reduce the chopping-off of the first part of the first
syllable, and allows the transmitter to be un-keyed at the end of the
transmission before the beginning of the squelch-tail noise burst gets
out of the delay pipeline.


Our repeater system uses several polling receivers at different sites.
(6 or 7 IIRC) The recievers transmit their received signals to the main
site. The main repeater site determines which is the strongest signal,
and sends that one through to the main repeater transmitter.

As you can imagine, there is some delay there too. Maybe 250 milliseconds.


I can't recall hearing anyone argue that an FM analog repeater with an
analog bucket-brigade (or even ADPCM digital) audio delay circuit was
magically "not a repeater" because the audio retransmission was not
"instantaneous". If the D-Star not-a-repeater proponents were to win
their case, it might be a *very* pyrrhic victory, as analog repeater
owners might also qualify to move into non-repeater frequency
segments. Sauce for the goose...

One of the biggest problems putting up a repeater these days is that
many areas are just full. There's no room at the Inn. And the area in
which a D-Star is likely to do best is in those crowded areas. So they
tried to do an end run around the issue. Without a lot of thought.

Seems like we have a nice patch of bandwidth between 2 meters and 440
that is a bit underutilized?

- 73 de Mike N3LI -