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

[Gregg Wonderly]

On 1/9/2012 3:53 PM, Bob Bruninga wrote:
>> As I understand it DSTAR keeps track of where a certain radio
>> (callsign) was last heard and this allows it to route calls
>> world wide. I don't think EL provides anything like that.
> Which is sad, since that has been the #1 APRS priority since 2001.  To have
> Echolink and IRLP recognize USERS by either APRS or DTMF!  We demonstrated
> it back in 2001 but just cannot get them to accept the value of knowing WHO
> HAS BEEN HEARD WHERE. (which APRS has been doing for 2 decades, and DTMF for
> 40 years).
>
> Please see http://aprs.org/avrs.html
There is plenty of opportunity to make changes to echolink.  What needs to 
happen, is it needs to be forked.  This is entirely doable, if there are people 
ready to take on the task of creating and supporting the core server 
infrastructure.  It could readily be done on Amazon or other hosting services, 
with no need to have "hardware" that is owned.  Clearly, you have to pay the 
Amazon bill, and I would guess that could be more than $1,000/month because 
echolink constantly talks to the servers to find out about current connectivity 
statistics.

In the end, I really think it would be better just to fork it, and redo several 
things on the control channel so that the UDP port could be "variable", and a 
data path from client to client could be provided using X.25 as the "container" 
protocol.  Then, we could have APRS and other X.25 protocols supported from 
station to station.

My Java echolink client, would be one way to create a new client that would work 
on multiple desktop interfaces, and with a little work, it could actually also 
be a proxy to the existing echolink clients.  I have quite a few things on my 
plate right now, but http://javecho.dev.java.net is setting out there for 
everyone to play with.

Gregg Wonderly
W5GGW

Gregg Wonderly