Just a reminder that due to the Monday holiday, the next NCRC meeting will be on Tuesday October 11th and KHV.
The business meeting will be busy as we need to present our proposed budget for 2017, as well as a slate of officers to be voted on in November.
Following the meeting there will be a simulation by Willy W1LY of a DXpedition.
The W1AAD repeater was off the air for a time today to allow some additional changes to be made on the ircDDBGateway software (our thanks to VK4TUX, Adrian, who is doing that work for us, and Pete, W1LAB, who had to go to the repeater site to reboot it this afternoon).
The original DPLUS software services, that are used to link to the DPLUS reflectors, like REF069C, was working but preventing smooth operation of all the new linking features. A decision was made to turn DPLUS off, and doing that seemed to fix all the voice identification issues and allow linking of any reflector via DTMF.
To use a DTMF command, please make sure your UR field is set to CQCQCQ, which is the normal setting for carrying out a conversation on the repeater. The following DTMF commands will then work:
0 –> Will give you a voice announcement of link status
# –> Will unlink the repeater
** –> Will link to the default reflector, which is REF069C
*50C –> Will link to REF050C
B2A –> Will link to XRF002A
D5A –> Will link to DCS005B
D523 –> Will link to DCS005W
Two digit codes “01” to “26” can be used to represent the “A” to “Z” letters
Hence, “W” is 23. By the way D502 would be the same as DCS005B.
Forrest, W1MEE, has been forging ahead with his plans to get a tower installed at Rogers High School to support the school club station. The staff of the school has approved the plan and has passed it along to the school committee, which is planning to vote on the request Tuesday October 11th at 7 PM (in room 924 in the NACTC building next door to the school).
If you would like to show your support for the school and ham radio, I know that Forrest would really appreciate you attending.
Thanks to Ted, W1GRI, Pete, W1LAB, John, K1JSM, and Bob, WB4SON, who have spent every Thursday in September working on the DSTAR repeater hardware, and to those same fellas that funded some software and hardware upgrades, NCRC members now have access to all the latest and greatest DSTAR extended linking features, callsign routing, and more convenient touch-tone control of the repeater.
The team hired an expert out of Australia, Adrian, VK4TUX, who has impressed repeater owners on this side of the world with his ability to do the near impossible — making the Icom Gateway software co-exist with the ircDDBGateway software, enabling the new features. Adrian worked his magic via the internet over the period of a couple of days, and by today at noon, everything was up and running. Adrian was a saint and worked his schedule around ours. For example he was working on the system today from 9:30 AM to noon our time, which was 11:30 PM to 2:30 AM his time.
While the original DPLUS Gateway page still exists at w1aad.dstargateway.org, a more complete ircDDBGateway + DPLUS status page can be found on port 40001 (w1aad.dstargateway.org:40001). Use any browser to see the new status page:
If you scroll down you will find the original DPLUS Dashboard (or you can click on the “DPLUS Dashboard” link that shows on the banner at the top of the page.
Hardware changes involved a new UPS (the repeater LOVES to eat up UPS units due to heat), a replacement monitor and display designed for rack use, and a new disk drive.
In addition to all the new software features, the group worked on making sure we had a valid backup HDD, an image of the disk, and have setup a process to automatically backup the critical User Registration Database. Finally a comprehensive Supervisors Manual was written.
For a high-level review of DSTAR, we recommend starting with the DSTAR101 website.
Thanks to the efforts of Ted, W1GRI, and Pete, W1LAB, who made yet another trip to the DSTAR repeater, it is now back on the air, linked to Reflector 69 Charlie, and it is working fine. However we are moving forward with software upgrades that will allow us to link to additional resources, called DCS and XRF Reflectors, plus CCS callsign routing that can be accomplished with touch-tones (rather than UR, RPT1, RPT2 changes).
Don’t be surprised if the repeater is up or down randomly over the next week or so as those upgrades are being installed.