It is apparent that this topic (amateur digital radio) is being reacted to in the manner all subjects dealing with ham radio, in a knee-jerk fashion. Everyone, who has an interest in ham radio, has an opinion. The advertisement mentioned by Gill seems to have generated some misunderstanding. I didn’t see this hue and cry raised when AOR introduced the
ARD9800 for sale over a year ago, and it can be used on
any radio. The ICOM D-STAR is certainly not a new topic, development on this began in
1998 and of course continues.
This type of reaction is seen
every time a new mode or new technology is introduced to ham radio. Indeed, any change in the
status quo is seen as something that is introducing the downfall of ham radio. Let’s review some milestones in amateur radio, all of which were supposed to bring a death knell to the hobby. Lets see, lowering the code speed required for HF privileges to 5 WPM, no-code technician licenses, incentive licensing, SSB (indeed voice of any kind!), RTTY (or really any of the so called digital modes now popular), etc. Each and every time some
new facet to the hobby is brought to the forefront, someone is there to cry “It’ll be the end of the world!”
Every person involved in ham radio has an opinion, every mode its proponents and opponents, my opinion on some matters is different from yours, maybe on some things we may agree. The introduction of digital voice on the ham bands is no different than the introduction of any mode. Sure there will be people who monitor the digital signal and won’t be able to understand it, so what? There are plenty of things on the ham band’s I can hear but can’t understand, 25 WPM CW (indeed anything over about 10 wpm does me in :lol: ), ATV, SSTV, until recently PSK. Digital voice will either catch on or it won’t. If it catches on, in 25 years everyone will look at analog signals much the way most people look on AM; a curiosity, but a waste of spectrum.
There are already several digital repeaters on the air around the US, most using old APCO-25 equipment and hence can be monitored by the current digital scanners. Is the introduction of a consumer grade 2 meter, handheld, D-STAR capable radio a reason to cry out the end of monitoring 2 meters? No, milf take a deep breath, just as repeater control operators turn off PL tones during times of emergency to allow all the
ancient radios to access repeaters, people are not going to use digital voice for Skywarn anytime in the near future. Gill, you need to take a deep breath also, digital voice will
not work on
any repeater, indeed almost no repeater will pass the signal. If for no other reason (and there are others), you can’t pass a CTCSS tone on a digital signal, so there isn’t going to be access to the input. Joe, just because you can’t download a decoder doesn’t mean it isn’t available to the general public; you can’t download a SSB decoder, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t available. Scott, whereas I agree with you that a lot of negativity has been involved in the thread and that with enough interest this might be beneficial in the Public Service aspect of the hobby, I don’t think anyone suggests that digital voice will
save amateur radio. :wink:
