Omaha Digital Communications Group

Whoops! Your sleep-deprived website admin pulled a Homer today and accidentally deleted the entire OmahaDigital.org directory on his web server! Good thing he has the site backing up to his mule computer in Lincoln!

I able to restore the site’s files (obviously, since you’re here reading this) a few minutes after the accident. Estimated downtime was around 10 minutes. The database was not harmed.

I’ll be more careful next time!

As expected, the upgrade went off without a hitch!

I’ve also installed a couple of plug-ins to Wordpress which may add some neat functionality. One of them is a house keeping measure, to help block spam comments, which thankfully we don’t have a problem with.

The other is for OpenID authentication. For those of you already using OpenID, you can log-in to our website using an OpenID provider of your choice. This will give you the ability to comment on posts and pages without needing to create a username and password specific to this site.

For those of you not using OpenID, allow me to offer a general overview of what it is. OpenID was created with the idea that you’ve already got an account at another website, perhaps LiveJournal, for example. To use another site, it seems silly to have a log-in for every site. Instead, why not have LiveJournal vouch for your identity? That’s essentially how it works. Continuing with our example with LiveJournal, if I wanted to use OmahaDigital.org with OpenID from LiveJournal, I would log-in to OmahaDigital.org with an address to my page at LiveJournal, for example sampleuser.livejournal.com and hit the log-in button. My browser will then go to LiveJournal and ask me to log-in there, using my LiveJournal username and password. Once authenticated, LiveJournal vouches for me with OmahaDigital.org, and says, “Hey, this K0SKW character is the real deal, let them comment!” and I’d then be presented with the comment box.

It sounds complicated, but once you’ve done it, it makes sense.

More site-work to come in coming days, have a few things in mind I want to play with first!

Good evening everyone! I just wanted to let everyone know that I’ll be moving our installation to Wordpress 2.6 from Wordpress 2.5.1. I do not foresee any issues with upgrading, and am currently upgrading another one of my sites.

I expect the upgrade to take under a half-hour, and be started sometime around 10pm local tonight.

Thanks, and I’ll see ya on the air.

John/WB0CMC has asked that I mention that he has a pair of new IC-91AD D-Star handheld radios he’s selling for $350 each. He brought them back from Dayton’s Hamvention and as they go for $434 at Ham Radio Outlet right now, that’s a great deal for someone wanting to get into D-Star or wanting to add another radio.

Email John if you’re interested at his callsign at arrl.net.

I wanted to invite you all to join our D-Star online community by posting and sharing your thoughts, ideas and observations here. As the owner (or future owner) of a D-Star radio, you know that it’s quite a new frontier in our amateur community, and it’s quite reassuring to have company of others sharing their thoughts.

We have an interesting community with D-Star, and in a lot of respects, it has the capacity to be a transitional technology for amateur radio that helps us bridge across to the open source generation, reaching out to Linux experimenters curious about radio communications globally. As a very early Generation X’er born in the late 1960s, I’ve always considered myself blessed to have known some remarkable generations in our nation’s history. I learned stories about pancake men selling hotcakes from horse-drawn wagons and the joys of brand new electrical lights in the home from a special great grandmother from the Lost Generation, was taught about sacrifice, hardship and survival of difficult depressions and wars from grandfathers, great aunts and uncles from the Greatest Generation, and was able to see the end of the era of drive ins, shiny diners, big cars, drive in theaters, nickel sliders and lazy afternoon Cleveland Indians baseball games. At the same time, I was a high school kid in the mid 1980s, definitely relating to movies like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and 16 Candles. My generation experienced the explosion of choice: from 3 to 300 TV stations, music niches previously unthinkable, tacos, Chinese, Thai and a whole new world of food, and countless other benefits of a new global, digital world. We were the kids that grew up with Apple IIs, Atari and in many respects, became the first digital generation.

Because of our odd heritage, many Generation x’ers I’ve talked with feel a definite “foot in the future, foot in the past.” We owe so much of our experience to the memories of an America now long gone, but one we caught the very fading glimpse of, while also being the children that accepted a world of bits and packets. In that respect, D-Star seems to be an appropriate home for us radio Gen-X’ers, with a leg in the rich history of amateur radio’s analog past, and the other in the digital future.

The D-Star gateway community has been an interesting one to work with, and the generational differences are quite evident. Many of our Baby Boomer gateway administrators have a different approach to the operation of gateways, often seeking a black box or an appliance much like a DVD player that you simply operate and don’t worry about the internal operations. Others, usually from our Generation X digital generation, tend to challenge and question the assumptions of these inner workings. While these differences can lead to interesting debates, the D-Star gateway community has shown itself to be one that has set the personal differences aside and focused on moving this important gateway technology forward. It’s clear that we’re part of a significant and exciting change in amateur radio.

Our D-Star community in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa also consists of a cross-section of generations, with people of all different interests and backgrounds. It would be great to hear from you and learn why you got into D-Star, as each story I’ve heard so far about this transitional digital amateur technology has been an interesting one. If you can, please click on the “comments” option and share your experiences and story about trying D-Star.

We’re starting to see some new callsigns showing up on the DStarUsers website, which is pretty exciting evidence of a growing digital radio community. As co-gateway administrator (sharing duties with Corby Krick, K0SKW), I periodically check to see who’s showing up in the event we have new local users that haven’t been added to the gateway registration.

Registration is important for amateurs to be able to use the gateway linking features. It only takes a request that is initiated on this website (and a small fee of a couple of beers for Corby and I if you’re interested in our expedited request processing program) and the callsign will be added. As the request sends an email off to the two of us, we’ve been getting them processed rather quickly.

In case you’re curious what ham friends are already registered and part of our D-Star community, here’s what we presently have (in no particular order): K0CTU, K0MMR, K0NSA, K0SKW, N0EMA, W0BLM, N0MEQ, N0TRK, N0WJP, NG0K, W0AAI, W0JWS, W0NWS, W0JRS and WB0CMC.

Once you’re registered at one gateway, you’re registered throughout the D-Star system. In fact, you’re even set to use your DV Dongle if you add one and wish to link into the network from a PC and Internet connection. I’m planning to add one this fall for when I’m traveling for work and am in a location with no local gateways.

As mentioned earlier this month, we added another D-Star radio to the family following a coworker’s tip that Gigaparts was running a good sale on the Icom gear. The Icom ID-800H D-Star ready radio showed up just in time for our family vacation to central Ohio. I thought I’d share some initial impressions of the radio:

• Physical Package: The radio comes across as being solidly built, and reminds me much of my IC-V8000 except with a removable faceplate. Of course, the D-Star radio traces its actual lineage to the IC-208D which is pretty apparent from the visual similarities. I ordered the mobile mounting kit, which included the MB-65 mounting base and the MB-58 mounting bracket. Icom’s mounting and cable accessories are one area where you clearly feel like you’re being robbed, as $45 for two small pieces of steel and some velcro stickers is outright highway robbery. If it wasn’t for having nearly no good location in my truck to place the radio other than a detached head mount, I would have saved the $100 and stashed it someplace.

• Analog Operation: The radio does really well, with clear booming audio that’s a little bit sharper than the somewhat muffled audio from my Kenwood TM-D700. The mic included is the deluxe one with the keypad, so learning how to program and use the radio using the mic was pretty straight forward (some would say, not in the D-Star tradition of complicated, sometimes maddening documentation usually found in gateway and repeater documents).
• Digital Operation: I found the radio to be much easier to program than the ID-92AD handheld. Setting up MYCALL, URCALL, RPT1C and RPT2C to get you communicating with a D-Star repeater was rather easy (incidentally, for Omaha D-Star operation on the KD0CGR-C 145.175- repeater, you want: MYCALL=your callsign, URCALL=CQCQCQ, RPT1C=KD0CGR C (the space is important), and RPT2C=KD0CGR G )
• Mounting Ease: The mounting kit, as expensive as it was, did provide for a very clean setup. I have the detached head on the dash, with the rig under the driver’s seat. That saved me another $50 on a microphone extension cord (another unjustifiably expensive accessory). I considered placing the rig behind the passenger back seat in the truck, but for this crew cab, it would have required yet another expensive cable to extend the reach of the detached head, and another $75. I was pleased to get the antenna in through the back of the cab, along with my 10 gauge DC wire. The best part of the installation was putting a small PowerPole RigRunner 4005, permitting the DC run to be shared with other devices if needed.

The best part about the ID-800H was its relative affordability compared to the other mobile options, such as the IC-2820H which requires an extra UT-123 D-Star module to work in the digital mode.

While the KD0CGR repeater presently doesn’t have its own weekly Omaha D-Star net, we’re currently linked to the Lincoln Nebraska W0MAO repeater and Omaha D-Star hams can check into the Lincoln network right automatically through the linked repeaters.

Event: W0MAO Weekly D-Star Net
Time: 20:30
Day: Tuesday
Frequency: Weekly

This Independence Day weekend has been a great one for our ham radio family to catch up on projects. My son (Jay/W0JWS) and I got my HF digital station back on the air for BPSK31 following some earlier frustrations with my RigTalk and RigRunner Plug-and-Play seemingly not wanting to transmit (turns out you have to pay attention to which COM port you think you’re talking to!).

To add to the excitement, we’ve got a D-Star mobile radio on its way to us thanks to a tip from a First Data coworker and ham, Joe Moll/K0DNS. Joe passed along the news that Gigaparts is running a really good sale on D-Star radios and accessories. I couldn’t pass up the discount and ordered an ID-800H mobile dualband D-Star ready radio for about $80 off what I’d been pricing elsewhere. If you’re interested in getting into D-Star or expanding your capability, definitely check out the sale.

That said, I’ve had a lot of ham radio friends ask about D-Star and its value, especially given the expense of having to buy new radios equipped with the functionality. Like about anything else in this hobby, it’s not cheap. The benefits definitely need to be clear to make the jump. Here are a few reasons to consider getting involved with D-Star capable amateur radio:

D-Star Radio Framework

D-Star isn’t simply “digitized voice communications” — it’s a packetized radio framework that supports digital voice as just one of many of the applications that share the same frequency. If you think of computer communications back before the Internet and other packet sharing networks, everything was point-to-point communications, with the use reserving the resource (be it a leased line or a radio link) and being locked into a specific application. Packet sharing separated out the medium from the application and allowed the medium to be shared by lots of different applications.

D-Star does just that for amateur VHF/UHF/SHF frequencies, giving you immediate access to the voice application that runs on top of the framework, but also leaving it open for amateurs to build and operate other applications. Out of the gate, D-Star’s gateway-linked voice is a great application that allows you to connect and talk with hams worldwide on other D-Star gateway-linked repeaters. Of course, IRLP does a similar linking function without the expense of a new digital radio.

APRS over D-Star, GPS position reporting, text messaging, and even slower speed Internet communications are able to run along side with voice traffic, putting D-Star’s framework more to use. Many more applications are out there that I haven’t experimented with, and given the open framework, it’ll be exciting to see how else it’s put to use. For the Linux hacker, open source programmer, or other digitally-inclined experimentalist, D-Star is a great place to put your amateur license to work.

In time, I hope to see us activate a 1.2 GHz D-Star digital node in Omaha as well, providing 128 Kbps IP connectivity for amateur use around the greater Omaha area (if you’re interested in seeing 1.2 GHz active, shoot me a note at my callsign at yahoo.com).

Getting Started

The other Omaha Digital Communications Group guys had some good tips for me when I was ready to jump into D-Star that are worth passing along. Their recommendations helped me get into the digital mode with a lot of flexibility, while watching the wallet:

• Go handheld first: Your HT gives you a lot of mobility vs. the expense of a mobile that sits idle in your car or truck half the time. I picked up a D-Star ready IC-92AD ($500-$580) which is a little on the steep side for a dual-band HT (my Yaesu VX-7R was a bit less than $300).
• Get an amplifier for mobile use: I added a Mirage B-34-G 35 watt amplifier for $100 and it’s been great for solid D-Star while mobile in my truck.
• Get your software and PC cables for your radio: Besides helping with programming your radio, the cables and Icom software (e.g. RS-92) are very handy since they get you going with the other digital applications.

If you have questions, definitely reach out to one of us KD0CGR repeater guys (John/WB0CMC, Greg/W0AAI, Steve/N0UP, Corby/K0SKW, Jamie/W0JRS) or some of the D-Star savvy people in Omaha (like Mary/N0TRK). Some of the initial setup can be confusing, especially if you accidentally read the Icom manuals, so don’t hesitate to reach out via email or on the analog repeaters.