D-Star Digital repeaters used to support Marathon

Forum for the promotion and understanding of digital voice on the amateur bands.

Moderator: Global Moderator Team

Post Reply
ka8ypy
Administrator
Posts: 3493
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2006 11:01 pm
Location: Fine Business and HI HI
Contact:

D-Star Digital repeaters used to support Marathon

Post by ka8ypy »

OK..so about 100+ hammies (and hamsexuals) provided voice and data communications to the 31st Marines Corps Marathon yesterday.

The voice part is eyes on the route at every mile marker, water point and aid station.

The data part including APRS, is to provide data back to the Marathon headquarters on the status of any runner that has entered/exited an aid station. In the past this was done via 9800 buad packet running on UHF freqs.

This year it was done using Icom ID-1 1.2GHz data radios. 7 aid stations on the route plus the comms van had ID-1's, Icom actually provided 2 D-STAR 1.2GHZ repeaters for the event and all of it seemed to work pretty damned well. As far as the data side is concerned, the biggest problem any operator had was setting up the windows interface to the radio. We never really used it for the voice side, and it would appear that ICOM is not going to add the AMBE vocoder to the repeaters anytime soon as a matter of too pricey for a ham to buy.

After that it was on, runner stats were passed to the database crew, where the data was recieved on a laptop off of the "network" and then sent to the medical database via a telnet program seemlessly. We also had IRC chat channels up to the respective operators and could pas traffic and updates not medical related that way as well.

After talking to the ICOM reps (including a district manager for amateur products) that came to the event, and playing with it somewhat in a "tactical" environment, I may have to change my judgement slightly on D-STAR.

DB
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen commrade
tvsjr
Moderator - Dayton 2006/2007 Supporter
Posts: 2830
Joined: Wed Jul 21, 2004 5:03 pm

Post by tvsjr »

The way the repeaters/controllers are configured, you'll likely never see a "DIU" for the DSTAR repeaters.
ka8ypy
Administrator
Posts: 3493
Joined: Thu Jan 26, 2006 11:01 pm
Location: Fine Business and HI HI
Contact:

Post by ka8ypy »

tvsjr wrote:The way the repeaters/controllers are configured, you'll likely never see a "DIU" for the DSTAR repeaters.
I didn't ask how it works for the "digital" data repeaters we used. But it would seem to me that if the controller can pass the data, why not digital voice??

BTW, the digital voice sounded pretty clean in simplex, they gave the operators supporting the marathon command group each an IC-91AD to use. Still light weight like most ham gear (my xts battery weighs more).

DB
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen commrade
Post Reply