Very cool. Thanks for putting out the effort to contact him and start this
dialogue.

-----Original Message-----
From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Buddy Brannan
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 6:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
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