NCR News and Events
Vienna Winterfest 2011
The Vienna Winterfest was a big hit this year. On display we had operational DVAP and DV-Dongle, an operational ID-800 operating the NV4FM repeater, and a static ID-1 displayed. The video was a show stopper and attracted a lot of people to ask questions, make inquiries and several NCR D-Star brochures were passed out.
Overall it was a big success, and furthered the use of D-Star in the area.
The largest problem that we encountered was HAM's w/ D-Star equipment cannot seem to figure out how to program their radios. This keys us into a need in the amateur community to have an educational video as to how to configure their gear. Our Wiki has a very nice segment on the operation of D-Star.
The NCR D-Star Association will endeavor to create an introductory video on programming D-Star radios.
N2VQM fielded a variety of questions, as well as WA4KFZ along with Marshall (KI4MWP) the "one take wonder" making a secondary appearance of last years Winterfest DVAP presentation on the 32" display. A good time was had by all, many people were educated about D-Star technology.
Open Source D-Star Repeaters?
A couple NCR Members have been paying particular attention to the world of Open Source D-Star, and it appears that there is light at the end of the tunnel. What we find ourselves wondering is whether or not it's a freight train.
KC2UJH has taken a NQSMHS board and a couple Yaesu FT-1500's, and built a full blown D-Star repeater from them with the assistance of N2VQM and K7VE. Initial testing indicates that this is a viable means, and although the NI-Star repeater software seems to function, further testing is not able to be done at this time because the US Trust will not allow any more Non-Icom repeaters into the trust. This adversely effects the ability to test, and makes it impossible for the new repeater to work with D-Plus.
What we did find is that these problems with not being allowed into the US-Trust with non-Icom gear seems to be a compounded problem in that the US-Trust does encounter database corruption from time to time and relies on volunteers to "sort it out". In order to gain the support of Icom the volunteers have to eliminate all possibilities that this database corruption problem is caused by Non-Icom gear.
As a solution, a number of innovative HAM's have introduced a new callsign routing system called ircDDB. It's reported this new callsign routing system can be installed on existing D-Star repeaters, although NCR is taking the "Let's wait and see" approach before making the decision as to whether or not to deploy it on any production NCR Repeaters.
This new ircDDB routing system system is demonstrated below by VK5ZEA:
As you can see, from the video this does in fact seem to work, and it wouldn't be the first VoIP solution that utilized IRC as the control channel for call routing. However the problem with this solution is again a political problem in that the requirement for D-Star Registration and the Trust-Servers was driven from a requirement of certain governments that there be some level of control imposed upon the design. Exactly what these requirements are is still unclear, but from what we understand Japan was one of these countries and since D-Star was a product of the JARL it's easy to understand why Trust was imposed upon the design.
What NCR is wondering is whether or not the situation of innovative HAM's going around the problem of not being able to register their Non-Icom repeaters in the Trust will become the new de-facto D-Star standard. The outcome of this is that the popularity of D-Star would see a boom as the cost of deploying a D-Star repeater would become far less. On the flip side of the coin, unfortunately this may leave some amateur operators in foreign countries "out in the cold" and create a situation where they may not be able to participate in the global D-Star network.
NCR members will be experimenting with this new Open Source repeater system, and will be testing the IRCDDB callsign routing. We'll update the site with our findings and if the system proves reliable we'll also document the system in the NCR Wiki.
