[ale] Digital Communications Conference

[Jim Lynch]

On 09/20/2011 11:06 AM, George Allen wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 9:12 AM, Jim Lynch
> <ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com>  wrote:
>> I attended the DCC over the weekend in Baltimore.  The DCC is aimed at
>> discussing issues of digital communications specifically of interest to
>> amateur radio.
> Did they do any talks on mesh networks/routing?
> Any references/parallels to the following:
> JITRS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Tactical_Radio_System
> WIN-T Inc 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PM_Warfighter_Information_Network-Tactical_(WIN-T)
Yes and no.  mesh networks/routing is in its infancy in amateur radio.  
There is some interest in getting all of the currently vertical systems 
to talk with each other.  Bob Bruninga, father of the APRS protocol, 
gave a talk on the last day entitled "Universal Ham Radio Connectivity 
by Callsign".  He was accompanied by Mark Braustein who is a D-Star 
proponent and expert and John Gorcos (from Cumming, BTW) who is actively 
building the Automatic Voice Relay System (AVRS).  I'm sure the result 
will never rival anything the military implements since this is an all 
volunteer effort and has limited resources compared to DOD.  The page, 
http://www.aprs.org/avrs.html covers a lot of the activity.  I won't 
bother to waste most folks' time by outlining the efforts since it's 
well covered on the web site.

By the way, Bob Bruninga is also an instructor at the Naval Academy. A 
pretty bright guy all around.

There were two main threads of interest in this DCC.  The SDR (software 
defined radio) and uses and extensions of APRS (Automatic Positioning 
Reporting System).  Bob wants to change the acronym to Automatic 
Presense Reporting System to keep in step with his talk.

SDR is the state of the art and is now exceeding the performance of 
analog radios dollar for dollar.

Jim.