Nice to see we can have a non real time conversation via this digital license free mode.. (HAHA) and share it with the rest of the subscribers..
Last night on YOUTUBE I caught the "podcast" of Ham Radio 2.0 .. That guy is out of Dallas Texas and I met him at on of the Dallas Hamfests last year and also at ARDMORE, OKLAHOMA.. His latest podcast was regarding the 3 new YAESU radio's just announced..
After viewin gthat I found John KRUK's -Yaesu America national Sales Manager, s review of the same 3 new radios. THe claim is that they will be at Dealers by the end of November --isn;t that yesterday?? Not like ICOM or Kenwood who announce new radio's and it's 6 months before they can be had....
Anyhow all 3 new Yaesu's are ANALOG FM Two are 2 meter a 65 watt and 85 watt rig.. Then a 2meter 440 dual band 50-35 watt unit.
John Kruk went into a big spiel regarding ANALOG FM and the fact it is not dead and many hams have little use for digital modes or digital modes are just not popular in their part of the country.. Since neither of us live in NYC, LA or Boston, he's right..
I may condsider the new dual band rig as it's virtually "plug and play" for ALLSTAR.. It has a data port on the rear of the rig which will accept a DINAH dongle (made by the same people as the famous ALLSTAR SHARI) into a Raspberry PI. through a 10pin to 6 pin Yaesu data cable. The total cost of doing that is much less than the FTM-500 Fusion Dual band Yaesu..
The new rigs all feature weak signal digital signal processing making this ideal for a simplex wide area ALLSTAR NODE..
Considering the difficulty and extra costs to interface a Yaesu Fusion repeater to Allstar, 2 of the above would be a good lower cost way to get a repeater running on ALLSTAR..
Regards,
Larry W8LM...
Larry Macionski