Happy New Year!

Last week I was getting ready to head down to Atlanta to visit my daughter and her family. Atlanta is a great place to visit, especially if you are into D-Star. Heck, the whole Southeast are of the United States is a D-Star. But I digress.

I read a post on the TAPR APRS SIG about Yaesu finally introducing digital radio. It looks like they are going to bring out something that is based on P25. P25 is a digital mode developed for the United States Public Sevices - as in police, fire, government service, etc.

Now Icom introduced D-Star a number of years ago. D-Star was developed for the amateur radio community and developed for an international market. P25 is a digital method developed for the U.S. government market and not a worldwide market and hardly developed for the amateur community. D-Star is a completely open standard. The only thing proprietary is the digital Codec. Not a big deal.

There is a well established and growing D-Star presence throughout the world. So now Yaesu is going to come along and hose things up by introducing something different. What's next, Kenwood coming out with their own digital mode?

Yaesu's actions are nothing short of nuts. Why not go with what is already established and a defacto standard in the amateur community? What are they trying to create, the Beta/VHS war of years ago?

One amateur on the list who will remain nameless commented that he never got D-Star and thought it was stupid. Why? Because if could not interoperate with the U.S. public service systems! Well I have got news for him and everyone else. The police and fire agencies are NEVER going to link their communication systems with amateur systems. Thinking this is nothing but foolish. Each service will stand on its own. So that kind of blows the whole need for one common system for digital. Heck, even in the U.S., the railroads have chosen their own digital system. There is no standard across all services. Each service picks its own standard.

D-Star has become the standard. What a mistake for Yaesu to not have jumped on the D-Star bandwagon. Remember, Yaesu is the same company who went with "Wires" instead of Echolink and IRLP. As a result of that horrible decision, almost no one uses Wires. Yaesu is making another mistake trying to go on its own. This can only benefit Icom.

Received my DXCC All-Phone contacts award a few weeks ago from the ARRL and took it to the framing store to have it framed. Got it back yesterday. The local store does such a great job with the framing.

Just received my certificate for DXCC - Phone. The first DXCC award I received was for mixed contacts back in 2003. This award was for all phone contacts. The next closest award I am close to is DXCC on 10 meters (still need 20 confirmed contacts) and all Digital (still need about 45 confirmed contacts). One thing for sure is that the paper the award comes on now is rather flimsy. The first award from eight years ago had much heavier paper stock.

I remember when the Flexradio 1500 came out a few years ago. It really interested me and at the introductory price of $599, I almost bought one back then. However, I lost interest when it seemed like forever between the announcement of the 1500 and the eventual shipments started.

My buddy Russ, WB8ZCC, has become very interested in SDR and we used to banter back and forth about SDR and my concern with investing in a radio that was dependent upon a computer. What happens in 20 years when the hardware still works, but the manufacturer does not support the newer operating systems? Second, I just like knobs and a display on the radio.

Well you can imagine Russ' surprise when I told him I ordered a Flexradio 1500! I figured if I could get 10 years out of it then it would not be a bad investment.

I have to tell you that I am rather impressed with this little box. I have used it on SSB, CW, a bunch of digital modes like PSK, JT-65, and Hell, and even used it to receive DRM broadcasts on shortwave. The radio is just fun to use and so far I have not missed the lack of knobs on the radio.

Even with only 5 watts on this radio (the other Flex radios are higher power), this thing is pretty impressive. On SSB with 5 watts, I got a 58 report from a school station in Wyoming. Not to shabby. The Flexradio supplied software is really comprehensive. Through the use of virtual audio cable and virtual comm ports, you can use all sorts of external programs like MixW, HRD, DM-780, FLDigi, etc. and all through one single USB cable. Neat! No more interfaces and multiple USB/Serial cables.

So take a look at Flexradio and if you have the bucks, you might want to dip your toe into the world of SDR with the Flexradio 1500. You can find them at http://flexradio.com

As it turned out, I was able to go to Dayton this year on Friday. Just had to cut it short in order to get back to Cincinnati in time to pack up and head to Atlanta for the weekend. So here are some quick observations.

Vendors in the flea market were down substantially from last year. Still good, but a lot of open spaces. My personal opinion is that the fee for a space is too high for a casual seller. DARA should open those spaces each day of the flea market on a first-come-first-served basis for $20. A small seller cannot make a profit for what DARA currently charges.

I missed the explosion of the sanitary sewer on Saturday. What a mess it must have been. I am sure the smell was not any worse than normal. Hams really need to change their diets!

OK, now for the good stuff. Flexradio was hot and hard to get into their booth to look at their stuff. So I really could not get in to see if there was anything new. Whatever they had was creating a lot of excitement.

Yaesu did not have any hats this year. Something about them getting stuck in customs....yeah, right. Well no hats meant that traffic in their booth was down quite a bit.

TenTec was showing the new Eagle transceiver. Looked nice. Price is too high especially compared to the new Kenwood TS-590S which seems to be very similar in performance.

Icom and Kenwood had their new radios there. Icom booth was crazy as usual and Kenwood picked up on activity.

D-Star was still creating a lot of new excitement. The dedicated D-Star booth was always busy. D-Star is really picking up in popularity. Once you get on it, you don’t want to get off it. D-Star and digital is the future of ham radio.

ARRL was also busy as usual. They have an excellent presence at Dayton.

Byonics had a lot of new items for APRS and continues to generate a lot of excitement. Peak had a lot of reconditioned weather stations to go with the home APRS stations at an excellent price.

Wouxun radios were being snapped up quickly. At $85 to $105 depending on model and vendor, people were buying them like crazy. I heard many vendors sold-out of the Wouxun radios quickly. If you got one, find the KG-UV Commander Software as it is much easier to use than the crappy software from Wouxun.

GRE/Alinco had large booth. The exciting thing there was that they will be bringing out a new 900Mhz/1.2Ghz dual-band handheld. That is great and could help 900 Mhz take off. I noticed a growth in repeaters on that band, I just don’t know what radios people are using to access those repeaters. Well it appear Alinco is coming to the rescue.

Looking forward to next year and being able to spend more time there in 2012.