D-Star Community
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.
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