I think that upgrading (or creating from scratch) a wide-area repeater to do ¡°just another digital voice mode¡± (especially one that has only a few radio options available) will be a challenging request for a lot of groups.
But, if an M17 was able to do messaging and / or data (as in file transfers), that would provide additional incentive to do such an upgrade.
I¡¯m hoping that the (development in progress) MMDVM-TNC data mode becomes a reality and provides such a justification for upgrading / creating from scratch a repeater based on MMDVM, but having that capability in M17 would be great.
So, can anyone point me to a writeup or video that discusses messaging and data in M17?
