Yep, I have already sent an email and received the automated response, and now it is just a question of when and where I will be sending the Paypal payment to. The enthusiasm everyone here showed for the Shari made it an easy decision. And now begins the wait - like all skilled hobby craftsmen, this one has a backlog. As much as I love Amazon for becoming the mass transit of capitalism, streamlining things so well that our demand for instant gratification has fueled lower prices and tremendous opportunities to save gasoline and cut pollution, especially with them moving toward EVs, there is a lot to be said for anticipation. Besides, good things are always worth waiting for.
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Just for the record, this was never about saving a few bucks, it was about weighing the differences and making a decision based on value. If ham radio was about paying as little as possible, the entire hobby would consist of Altoid tin Pixie rigs and Baofengs. A lot of us may be careful shoppers, but I bet every person reading this message spends more on hobbies than the gross national product of a tiny country. :)
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What has been cool is reading about Allstar. I was getting into it just to kill a few hours over a few weekends. To be perfectly honest, I anticipated it being a slightly more open flavor of DMR or Dstar etc. In other words, I was getting into it just for the fun of the learning curve, and fully expected whatever Allstar gadgetry I accumulate to end up on a shelf in the disused corner of my radio room. DMR and the other little 70cm / 2m digital modes are awesome, on paper, but once you have numerous different MMDVM type tech running under different operating systems feeding logs to a custom front end that pulls data from everything into Grafana, where it is mixed with Brandmeister's last heard data just for good measure, you can practically visualize in your sleep how you want to arrange your next codeplug and which MMDVM and TS you intend to use for each mode, etc. And if you are like me, just doing projects for the fun of the voyage, knowing they have short expiration dates due to the boredom factor - well, you become accustomed to getting bored quickly, especially given that, after a year on DMR, I can count the number of QSOs with strangers that I have had on my fingers, if you don't count chats with personal friends. (this post certainly isn't reflecting this fact, but I talk very little in real life. A good conversation with a new friend can be one of life's greatest pleasures, but I like turning screwdrivers more than discussing the benefits of the Philips vs. flathead ). HF is ham like I always thought it would be, but IRLP type repeating seemed more like my day job than radio. But the more I read, the more interesting it becomes. I mean, Asterisk? Really? I hadn't even thought about that project since back when it was the only scalable and open PBX game in town, and you guys are playing radio with it? Not even exaggerating a little when I say that my heart beats a little faster when I think about the possibilities, and the ingenuity of you folks. Allstar could be more than a few month phase after all.?
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And the Libre le Potato looks like it will work fine with Allstar. All the better, too, the Pi ecosystem was breakthrough tech in its day, heck, I still have a Pi1 collecting ADS-B data, and I hope they hit the ground running when they return, but I'm not paying $200 for a $50 SBC. I bet G4KLX's MMDVMHost code could be modded to compile and run on one of the wall wart SheevaPlug type computers we have in the back of a junk closet somewhere, so imho, grossly overpaying for a Pi is lunacy. There are some excellent non-Pi options that fill the gap between now and the near future, when we can get back to having Pi Zero Ws practically falling out of our pockets.?
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Okay, sorry to get so far off-topic, I just wanted to express my gratitude, both for the good buying advice, and for helping pump me up for this next hobby arc. 73s everyone, here is hoping tht we all stay warm, safe and well fed.
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carl
KY4GD
