greetings all
First I would like to thank K6FED for making this very interesting
advisory document available as I found it to be of great help to
myself.
As a
complete newby to D Star I would like to get something
going in my area, Townsville North Queensland Australia.
We are located 1600klms north of Brisbane the capital of Queensland
and have no D Star at all to my knowledge out side of the
southeast corner of the state and no D Star radios owned by Hams in
this area.
I did as much research as I could understand and went about setting
up enough hardware to be able (I thought) to setup a D Star to
analogue
bridge.
My understanding and interpretation of this is that if I could have
some D Star traffic running on a radio that local hams might be able
to
listen too and communicate back to,? would foster some interest in
the mode for our local area and if there was enough interest
eventually
installation of a full blown D Star repeater for our Townsville
area.
I think I have lost count the number of times I have watched Andrew
Careys D Star to analogue bridge on "you tube" video but have been
trying
to pic up as many little bits and pieces that I might otherwise have
missed.
From this I have purchased the following hardware
1 - Icom ID51a D Star radio to use for testing
2 - DMK engineering usb to radio controllers
1 - DV RPTR board/Box complete
1 - DV 3000 board
2 - Raspberry Pi micro PC's
2 - Simico SR9000 radios one vhf and one uhf
I set aside last weekend to setup the Raspberry Pi with fixed ip and
remote access, .... downloaded and printed the NW designs "how to"
in order to get
AMBE to work as well as ircDDB gateway to work on the Pi
This would have been step one before adding a radio and setting it
going 24/7 and getting to know a bit about D Star?
I spent all of Saturday and Saturday evening trying to get this to
work and then put out a call for help. Adrian Fewster VK4TUX kindly
offered
assistance and at 9:30 am Sunday went about trying to get the
AMBE/DV3000 software and ircDDB software to work on the raspberry
Pi.
By 8:00pm Sunday evening and some 70 email exchanges later we were
no further ahead with this, and I decided to "can it" at that point
figuring
that my knowledge of linux is poor at best and if Adrian couldnt get
it going I would have absolutely no chance at all.
So now after reading though the options in the PDF file I find none
of the options will work as without a D Star radio you really cannot
do much.
With windows which is what I am more familiar with,? there does not
appear to be an option to use the dv3000 board which would make the
analogue
gateway possible.
I cannot expect local hams to go out and buy a D Star Radio in the
hope that they might like to continue down that path as it would be
a waste of money
to have a mode that they would never use should they not like it.
So with this in mind does anyone out there have any ideas as to what
I can do or is my expectations too high, ... in that case would I be
better to just can the whole
project and not waste anymore time and money on this???
I would very much appreciate some thoughts and ideas as to where to
from here?
thanks in advance and sorry if you got the long spiel, .... however
it is important to know at what point I have come from with this
and where to go from here.
--
Kind Regards
Kerry McKenzie
