Hi everyone, I want to give you an update on the D-Star repeater. As some of you know it has been in a local only mode for quite some time now.
Once we got the new club callsign (W3FDK) we had to adjust all of the repeaters to accept the new call sign. The FM and MMDVM repeaters only took a few minutes and the callsign was changed.
To change the callsign on the D-Star repeater you have to rebuild the gateway from scratch in addition to changing the callsign on the D-Star controller.
The D-Star controller took a few minutes to update. We brought the D-Star gateway computer down off of the mountain to work on it. Once we got it down it would not boot anymore.
Not sure exactly what caused it, the trip down the mountain, turning it off for the first time in a long time, etc.
We put in a new hard drive which seemed to do the trick, loaded up the software, took it up to the repeater site just to have it not boot again. After some tinkering it came back up.
Thanks to KC3PRI (Tony) we have a new machine almost ready to go but the problem still is that W3FDK has not yet been setup as a valid D-Star repeater in the D-Star system. So even if the machines were perfect, it would not work.
There are a couple of other options while we wait. One is to setup a hotspot in duplex mode reverse of the repeater. This seems to work in my testing here locally but I am not talking to the D-Star repeater hardware, just another MMDVM repeater. It would also not allow people to change reflectors.
The second option is to swap out the D-Star hardware with an MMDVM repeater setup in D-Star mode. Of the 2 option, this is probably the best because it would allow people to change reflectors and even use the other reflector types, not just the old REFxxxx reflectors. Also, it would eliminate the convoluted hardcoded network configuration that we are going to have to work around to modernize the network up there.
So that i where we stand at the writing of this update. With the pending snow, I am not sure if it will be possible to get up there this weekend to try either of the 2 options.
For Those Network Nerds….
The D-star system is hard coded for the Internet facing interface to be 10.0.0.2/8 and the internet gateway to be 10.0.0.1. It also requires 2 NICs, one for each network. The interface facing the repeater controller is a fixed IP of 172.16.0.1/16. So for 4 IP addresses they use up 16,842,748 IP addresses.
