Miscellaneous D-Star Developments

I've been backing off on the D-Star blogging. But here are a couple interesting developments that you'll likely never read about on any of WB9QZB's yahoo groups.

The first comes from DARPA (The Digital Amateur Radio Projects Association)

World Wide Routing for DSTAR

Hello to the group,

The gateway is now turned on and now we can play around with routing. But here is the catch.

The routing is a new world wide routing system call ircDDB (built by the Germans). It will route to both D-Star system that joins the world wide routing scheme.

The two D-Star systems that can handle routing are the US ROOT, which is made up of only ICOM and one Home brew system; and the Multi-Trust Servers that the Europeans built with the help of a few here in the US. There system is made up mostly of Home Brew and some ICOM systems. Of course the DARPA gateway (KJ4NYH) is built under home brew network (Multi-Trust Server). So with the new routing scheme we can now route to US root or anywhere else that has the same system.

More US gateways are joining this new routing method because it’s faster than the US ROOT routing.

You can view the dash board at http://ircddb.net/. Look for Gateway KJ4NYH on the dash board with a green light that means it ready for routing.

So what can or where can we route to? Well you can route repeaters/area gateways and also call signs that are placed in the UR Field, i.e. W4AES is the gateway for Orlando, FLA so my UR field will look like this—> /W4AES C.

Give it a try and see what will work. Just check out the dash board and look for US calls.

73

Will – W4WWM

Digital Amateur Radio Project Association – DARPA
Expanding the digital experience.

And here is a good video overview from Michael, VK5ZEA demonstrating it.

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The second, is a note from Ramesh, VA3UV on his Free Star* Project.

I started working on a project called 'FREE STAR*" about a year or so ago. FREE STAR* was an attempt to build a vendor neutral digital communication network and allow bridging between various VoIP protocols that are in use amongst radio amateurs today (app_rpt, IRLP, D-STAR, etc.).

I'll keep this brief - further info can be found on my website:

http://www.va3uv.com/freestar.htm

We have built a few systems on top of our Allstar / ACID boxes, they seem to work well.

Cheers,

Ramesh, VA3UV

Allstar Node 2200 > Bridged to XRF005A.