Coordination bodies should promote MMDVM

Seven years ago a smart UK ham gave us the means to retrofit repeaters to do this. Yet manufactures still just want to continue stomping their feet insisting their single mode is king.

And at the same time people (coordinators and repeater owners) don't feel passionate about the duties of coordination like they used to. The fact is in most of the coordination bodies guidelines their own purpose is to make most efficient and interference-free use of the limited frequency spectrum.

Here in Wisconsin there have a been several years where the annual update (still done by mailing in a form) was waived by the coordination body. Then there are people who have requested coordination and have waited over a year for a pair.

I don't feel more short lived coodination volunteers is the answer. The solution in my eyes is to ease the bureaucratic burden by changing the existing policies.

Also some general guidance / editorial ship when it comes to putting things on the air makes sense to me. Most areas don't have easy acccess to good sites, and thus can't support one analog, one D-Star, one DMR and one YSF system, etc. Repeater owners should be at least thinking about retrofitting with a STM32-DVM to enable more than one mode. Coordination bodies is in a leadership position to suggest such best practices. And do they really want to deal with coordinating all those seperate machines? I've noticed most digiatl modes go in fads, and then a mode/repeater sits idle when the next one becomes popular.

I feel users should be deciding what the future of digital voice modes are, not the repeater owners (with good sites) and coodination bodies. Promoting MMDVM modems helps level the playing field in this regard. I am not sure if anyone ever really thinks about this.

In addition to promoting smarter spectrum use and cutting down on coordinating extra machines, I think in the long term this could signal to manufactures that user radios that do more than one mode are logical. It's like how PL mandate on repeaters helped encourage PL built into user radios which became the norm later.

To be clear when I speak of MMDVM I am not referring to the low power personal hotspots. I am referring to the origional implementation of using a MMDVM modem to flat audio drive an analog system.

MMDVM - Blog and interface ordering from Bruce, VE2GZI

INADVM - MMDVM (type) interface board from INAD Communications / Kevin, W3KKC

RB_STM32_DVM - Repeater Builder Multi-Mode Digital Voice Modem.

Teensy MMDVM - Interface board and microcontroller from Micro-Node International.