Friday, July 16, 2010

Perceptions

In addition to the HF gear that I have brought along on our yearly pilgrimage to Lake George, I have also brought along the Wouxun 144/440 MHz radio and a spare battery. I have not gotten on to talk; but have done a lot of monitoring. I have not gone out of the way to program in any new repeater frequencies; but have made do with what I have already programmed in.

Sure enough, some of the repeater pairs that I have programmed in are active up here; and it's quite interesting listening. There's one repeater in particular, 147.135 MHz upon which I have heard at least a half dozen or so QSOs on the subject of D-Star. It appears that there is a group of Hams up here in the Adirondack region that are quite hot to get a D-Star network going.

I have heard Northern New Jersey and New Jersey in general being referred to as a "hotbed" of D-Star activity. I wish I had the correct PL tomes programmed in, as I could easily set them straight. Yes there is some D-Star activity in New Jersey; but I would not characterize it as a "hotbed". There are only one or two groups off the top of my head that I can think of that are actively using D-Star. Nowhere near the majority of Hams or repeaters.

Amazing how false information gets started going around. I am sure this happens quite often and is probably the way that "Urban Myths" originate and propagate.

72 de Larry W2LJ

1 comment:

  1. Where I am in Bergen County NJ, I think you need a mobile rig to hit a D-Star repeater and not a HT. There's none in Bergen County at the moment though I've heard Fairlawn is considering putting up a D-Star repeater or hotspot. There's a bit of activity in Western NJ in Sussex County but not here in Bergen County.

    http://nj2dg.org/page9.html will show a map though I wouldn't vouch for how accurate it is. One of the Sussex hams provides boards to create D-Star hotspots and you'll see most of the points on the map are hotspots that folks have setup. They aren't full featured repeaters but do an ok job in providing more coverage. I see W2TTT is listed in Bergen County as providing a hotspot. I know he wanted to do this but didn't know he might have it up and running (full time?) now.

    For me, it's spending a few hundred bucks and no one really to speak with right now.

    K2DSL - David

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