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.