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