The PAPA System

PAPA D-Star

D-Star News

August 8, 2007

Gateway News!

PAPA now has two certified Gateway administrators, Ed Kane W6ONT and Don Jacob WB5EKU. Today (August 8) PAPA successfully passed it’s first commissioning test with ICOM for the Saddle Gateway! The Saddle Gateway is now operational and ready to be installed on the hill.

This project has resulted from contributions of equipment and many, many man hours of labor by PAPA members. Pete K6PTB contributed a rack mount chassis, monitor, keyboard and mouse and installed the motherboard. Ed Kane has contributed many man hours making valuable contacts, arranging things with ICOM and working on the Gateways. Robert K6RCK contributed the mother board, a router and memory and has been working hard on the Saddle Gateway. Mark Mountain AI6MM has made our Saddle Gateway operational, fixing Robert’s hardware, and has also contributed a complete, fully operational rack mount server for use on Oat. In addition, Mark has arranged for high speed internet access on Saddle, which we need for Gateway operation there. Don Jacob WB5EKU has provided the frequencies for Oat, a router for Oat and is working hard on the Oat Gateway. Cecil WD6FZA has continued to provide leadership, donated significant time in working on getting us frequencies and on the RF side of the repeaters, as well as acquiring free hardware and making many trips to the hilltops.

Many thanks to all of you and to all others who have supported the effort either directly or simply by using the system. It has been a long road, but I believe the end is now in sight. So far, the performance of D1 has far surpassed our expectations. Because of your contributions and with luck and more hard work, we should have three D-Star repeaters—two with Gateways—operational by the end of September! Crestline should follow soon after that.

6/17/2007

As of today, we have access to an on-line, text-based chat room dedicated to digital ham radio (all modes), including D-Star enthusiasts, which is hosted by http://www.starlink-irc.org. It is web based and uses Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The channel is called #digitalham. I currently have an astronomy channel on this network, where I've been a regular for almost 10 years and a channel administrator for probably 5 years. There are many such networks, some good, some not so good. Starlink is a family oriented network with strict rules about on-line behavior and is by far the best run and cleanest network I've ever used. If successful, I think this will be a great way to get people from all over the world involved on-line in real time, for exchange of information, news, gossip and help deploying the technology. It might help us to solve problems and could vastly broaden the sponsorship in the ham community for our own D-Star initiative. Special thanks to the following individuals for agreeing to co-sponsor the formation of this IRC channel: Cecil Casillas, WD6FZA, Mark Mountain, KI6HBA, Ed Kane, W6ONT, Rich Bongeorno, W6VX, Craig Chambers, WB6HTS, Donald Jacob, WB5EKU, Norm Goodkin, K6YXH, Craig Honeyfield, KG6FIV.

You can join the chat room by clicking the “Chat Now” link on the home page of this site, optionally inputting a screen name and inputting the channel name, #digitalham. Two great advantages of the text-based chat is that you reach people all over the world 24/7 in a group setting and your chat sessions can be logged on your own machine, so you don’t have to take notes to remember something you learned.

Thanks to the hard work of Ed Kane W6ONT, we have also begun to add coverage maps to this site, generated by Radio Mobile. We will focus on D-Star sites and potential D-Star sites initially, but any site can be used.

For those who attended the picnic yesterday, we had a table set up with D-Star information and equipment and got many of you to take an interest in the technology. Cecil has negotiated special prices at Jun’s for D-Star equipment, which he can make available. Special thanks to Mark Mountain and to Leo Keligian for helping get some of our member’s D-Star radios programmed. I had a great time and the system worked perfectly. If anyone wants more information or simply has a question, criticism or request, feel free to contact me at rkuberek@ix.netcom.com.

We’ve also added a section “D-Star News Archive”, so that we can preserve the information provided on this page without having it eventually becoming infinitely long. If you are looking for something in particular that your remember seeing here, check the news archive if you don’t find it on this page.

6/10/2007

I’ve obtained permission from John Hays, K7VE, to publish his post in illinoisdigitalham (a Yahoo group) in full, in case you are not in, or have no interest in joining, the Yahoo group. It makes interesting reading. John’s post is appended to the D-Star News Archive page.

6/1/2007

Several of our fellow members went to Dayton this year, including Cecil Casillas. Cecil attended the D-Star event Friday night and made a number of valuable contacts. What follows is his report, as best as I can convey it, along with some additional information that has been gathered since the event as well as general status of the project.

Dayton Highlights

The D-Star forum was very well attended, with approximately 250 people for a 3-hour event. Cecil met and talked with a number of hams who are involved in this technology. My overall impression is that he was very impressed with the intensity and excitement of the group and rated ICOM’s presence at the convention generally very highly, though clearly it is the user community, through forums, newsgroups, eGroups and personal contact, that is providing support for D-Star rather than ICOM.

Cecil reported that there is a significant level of experimentation going on in the ham community with D-Star technology. Among the highlights, he reports that the codec, which is the only proprietary part of a D-Star system other than the Gateway software, is accessible, opening the door to amateurs to build D-Star compatible radios and to commercial manufacturers to offer D-Star compatible products, including radios and perhaps repeaters and repeater controllers. To underscore the point, Cecil (and presumably everyone else present) saw a demonstration of a home-brew 2-meter D-Star compatible radio designed and constructed by an amateur. An interesting perspective on this is in the post by K7VE:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/illinoisdigitalham/message/2018

While the ICOM D-Star repeater controller does the job, the consensus seems to be that being so new it lacks many of the functions and features of commercially available analog controllers. Cecil, therefore made it a point to visit for a good while with Linkcomm. While Linkcomm does not yet offer a D-Star capable controller, the developments described above make this a very real possibility in the near future.

As far as numbers go, Cecil learned that there currently are 53 repeaters on the Gateway, up from fewer than 30 at this time last year. Based on earlier back-of-the-envelope calculations this suggests to me that there are very probably 80 to 100 D-Star repeaters on the air, since not every repeater on the air uses the Gateway. In the Los Angeles there are known to be at least six repeaters, including our two operational repeaters, Oat and Palomar, and there is also significant activity in the Bay Area and in San Diego.

One of the challenges we have faced in implementing D-Star is that the repeater is somewhat of a black box. However, Cecil, working with Art McBride, KC6UQH, have manufactured a device that allows receive sensitivity to be measured using two radios and a conventional service monitor, which Cecil took to Dayton to show. Cecil in turn discovered that J.B. Archinard, KT4AT, has developed diagnostic software that allows for visual display of the states of a number of systems within the repeater without opening the cover. We have since obtained the software, courtesy of KT4AT.

We also learned that there is a significant move afoot to develop Gateway-like software under the open source model, perhaps under GPL. The site for this project will be opendstar.org and is now under construction. Keep checking to see how this is coming along. Other than the codec, the Gateway is the only significant proprietary component of ICOM’s D-Star system that will need to be worked around to make home-built systems fully D-Star network compatible (as opposed to simply being D-Star repeater compatible, which has already been achieved). This is just the sort of problem that may lend itself to the open source model. The significance of the Gateway is that it allows us to link our repeaters with each other and with other organization’s D-Star systems. At Dayton we learned (what we already suspected) that contrary to their published literature, ICOM has no plans to implement the 10 GHz microwave link radio, as a means of linking D-Star repeaters, in the US.

With respect to software, ICOM’s documentation specifies that the ICOM supplied Gateway runs only on Fedora Core 4 or Redhat. However, Cecil learned that successful operation has been achieved on Ubuntu and separately we have heard reports locally that the Gateway software will run on Fedora Core 6. We’ve since learned from Robin Cutshaw, AA4CC, that Core 5 and Core 6 should work, if configured properly. Tentatively we plan to install Centos 5 (Redhat Enterprise) on Oat, which should be even more stable than Fedora Core 6.

 

Robert, K6RCK