In article ,
Phil Kane wrote:

You know that whole D-Star "repeater" is not a repeater issue, so
frequencies are opened up for it in repeater crowded areas. Those
frequencies would not be proper repeater frequencies for an FM repeater.

Do you know a reference for that action Phil? I've looked a bit on the
FCC site, but haven't found it yet. I think it was in 2006.

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).

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.

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...

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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