Hi Matt,

I agree completely.

This is why I don’t have any D-STAR gear.

On Mar 12, 2014, at 7:38 PM, Matt Arthur <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi Buddy and all,
> That's great you have done this.
> I for one will not do D star unless i can do it independetly
> I refews to have stuff that i can not operate
> thanks 73 Matt ka0pqw
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Buddy Brannan" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 5:05 PM
> Subject: D-STAR On the Cheap?
> 
> 
>> Hi y'all,
>> 
>> I didn't want to post about this until I had something perhaps more
>> concrete, but I changed my mind.
>> 
>> Yesterday, I came across the following post:
>> http://hamgear.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/sub-200-d-star-radio-in-the-making/
>> 
>> Which is pretty exciting. A commercial radio manufacturer, interested in
>> breaking the Icom D-STAR monopoly stranglehold for portable radios? While 
>> I
>> have philosophical issues with proprietary black box codecs in use for
>> Amateur service things that promote experimentation and would prefer
>> something free and open, OK, I'm a minority. I get that. My biggest beef
>> with D-STAR is that it's tied to one radio manufacturer, and it looks like
>> that might actually change.
>> 
>> Well, I wrote to the President of Connect as directed, and it looks like I
>> have his ear. At any rate, he's willing to explore the issues around
>> building in some accessibility to his design. Of course, it would perhaps
>> not be full text to speech, so we likely wouldn't get the full on SMS
>> messaging and what not, but it sounds like h's amenable to having 
>> callsigns,
>> frequencies, menus, etc. available nonvisually. Just to give an idea, he
>> said that in order to get the voice samples for all the letters and 
>> numbers
>> would require an upgrade of the ROM in use by his current models from a 
>> 1MB
>> to an 8MB size, which would cost about $1.00 extra per unit. Y'all know 
>> what
>> this often means for us: it's an extra cost, and I won't be bothered. So I
>> wrote back and asked him if, indeed, this was a show stopper. I pointed 
>> out
>> that for letters and numbers, we were looking at, at most, about 56 voice
>> clips, very small ones, and if you didn't mind concatonating some files, 
>> you
>> could get away with far fewer than that. He wrote back and said, "Look, if 
>> I
>> was worried about a $1 part, I'd just add it into the price of the unit",
>> followed by, "With 8MB of ROM, I could potentially get thus and such many
>> voice samples without compression, even more with compression, and this
>> isn't a big deal". Well, more or less that's what he said, at any rate.
>> 
>> I've sent him my eyes-free guides for Wouxun and Puxing    to give an idea
>> of how we work with even "accidental" accessibility, also suggesting that
>> strategically placed tones, different pitched or length tones, etc. would 
>> be
>> helpful. So I really hope that as he works on this the he will find me a
>> useful enough resource to consult with so that we will actually have a
>> D-STAR radio we can use independently.
>> 
>> --Buddy, KB5ELV