Great move, Buddy! Thanks for speaking up for accessibility and, apparently, 
at just the right time. Hopefully, good things will come of it.
Lou Kolb
Voice-over Artist:
Radio/TV Ads, Video narrations
Messages On-hold:
www.loukolb.com
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Buddy Brannan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 6:05 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