[aprssig] OT: Yaesu to release digital amateur radio gear

[Stephen H. Smith]

On 1/9/2012 6:12 PM, Amateur Radio WB8NUT wrote:
> DMR might be more widely used outside of amateur radio, but within amateur 
> radio, D-Star is clearly the defacto standard at this point.
>
> As for lowered unit costs, the PS market is much larger than the amateur 
> market and lowered per unit costs have not occurred there as of yet.
>
> DMR was developed for the public service market, such as police, fire, etc.

Actually it was developed by ETSI (European Technical Standards Institute) as a 
multipurpose digital radio protocol for public safety, utilities, commercial 
land mobile AND for inexpensive consumer devices similar to our FRS (Family 
Radio Service).


>
> D-Star was developed specifically meet the needs of amateur radio.

Actually it was developed by a consortium of Japanese radio mfrs as a potential 
digital radio protocol for commercial land mobile somewhat similar to DMR, and 
was then offered royalty-free to JARL for ham use to essentially "beta test" 
the system under real-world conditions.


One huge advantage of DMR is that you can achieve 4800 BPS data transfer in a 
12.5 KHz channel or 9600 BPS in a classic 25 KHz channel (two 12.5KHz DMR 
channels bonded) for non-voice uses, even on VHF or UHF.