Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio

Sol Lancashire VA7SOL

Sol Lancashire,VA7SOL, took time out from his busy schedule to give a talk on D-Star to SARC members at the regular club meeting on January 7th 2009. The regular meeting venue at the PREOC was not available due to the recent flood watch so the meeting was held at the ABC restaurant in Newton. Sol explained how the D-Star repeaters are configured and how they are linked when in use. He covered the short-comings of the D-Star system as well as the many benefits of digital communications. One main benefit to digital is that most anything can be done providing the software is written to make it happen. Sol has written many software programs for D-Star and is without a doubt the most knowledgeable person in our area. Sol had many Power Point slides of some very technical areas for us to ask questions about.

There are two main D-Star repeaters in our area one is located on Seymour Mt. and is the old RAG repeater on 147.06 +, it is now a digital repeater and the other one is located at Central City on a tall commercial building it is VA7ICM and has excellent coverage all the way down to Seattle. Sol is the holder of the repeater licenses and maintains the website http://www.va7icm.ca/ if you want complete information on our local repeater check out the website.

For those with D-Star radios there is a net on Sunday mornings at 0930 between Surrey and San Francisco. The net usually lasts about 1.5 hours and is a great place to pose your questions. I recently wanted to have my D-Star radio send my position report to APRS and struggled with the manual which was little help. I asked the question on the Sunday morning net and received some great tips on how to set up the IC 2820.

I am hoping that Sol will be available in the future as D-Star is constantly breaking new ground in communications.

On behalf of all the members of the Surrey ARC thanks to Sol for sharing his knowledge with us.
Fred

Some D-STAR information sites:
http://www.warc.org.uk/clublinks.php
http://www.dstar.org/
http://www.warc.org.uk/clublinks.php
http://www.gb7sf.org.uk/