Pete, W1LAB, Ted, W1GRI, and Bob, WB4SON attended the CT-DSTAR Group breakfast yesterday in New Haven CT. The CT group has been very supportive of us over the years, always quick to offer advice. They operate the W1HDN DSTAR repeater in West Warwick as well as many other machines in CT.
On left: Fran, Bob, Jon, Ray, Jess. On right: Bob, Ted (Pete taking photo)
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.
Assuming you are already a registered DSTAR user and using your gear on the W1AAD repeater or elsewhere, and you want to take advantage of the Callsign Communication System, you will need a CCS7 ID, which is a 7-digit code that uniquely identifies you.
Don’t remember if you have registered before? Go to: http://dmr-marc.net/cgi-bin/trbo-database/ and click on the “User Database” button:
Enter the desired call sign in the Callsign field and click on “Search”:
So if you discover that you DON’T have an existing CCS7 DMR ID (the search comes up empty), then you need to register your call. Go to https://register.ham-digital.org/ Begin with Step 1 (selecting “Register services for an individual callsign”), and supply the additional information after you press the “OK” button.
After completing the registration request above, you will receive an email with your CCS7 ID number, usually within 24 hours.
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.