Ben Sutton

Just a quick post to let people know what we’ve been working on the past few months. D-STAR is a digital voice and data protocol for amateur radio. Its Wikipedia page is fairly comprehensive. Its an enjoyable mode mainly due to the ease of communication with other people around the world.

During the past few months we have set up D-STAR repeaters in Folkestone and Ashford. I helped set up the gateways. The standard configuration of a gateway is to run Cent OS and the G2 software distributed by Icom. There are many aspects to experiment with including DPRS, a digital positioning system similar to APRS and low and high speed data communication. Both GB7FK and GB7DX are connected to the K5TIT worldwide network via their respective gateways. Activity on the repeaters can be viewed on their last heard page.

There are many other D-STAR repeaters on the air around the UK. I plan on writing a fair bit more on specific features of D-STAR - let me know if your interested. In the mean time, if your near a gateway and want to give me a shout I can be reached via M0TUX on GB7FK port B.

Fon is a network that provides free and $3/day web access through wireless access points set up in homes and businesses. If you provide an open AP you can use any other for free, if you charge for access, you have to pay. The network has grown fairly rapidly. If you would like to join, do so before 8th November, 2006, as that is the last opportunity to purchase a subsidized €5 router. The new price is €29.95, so a decent saving.

A venture such as this could prove extremely useful for mobile VoIP. We’ll just have to wait and see if it interests enough people to make it useful.

For more information check out its Wikipedia entry.

This is pretty neat! EchoLink, the voice over IP software for Amateur Radio, now provides a Google Earth KMZ file showing the locations of all the currently connected nodes. As well as that, if you click on a link it shows the frequency. So, if your travelling somewhere you can visually see the links along your route and note them down. Very useful! The file can be found here:

http://www.echolink.org/node_location.kmz

In case anybody is searching for the syntax, here is a very brief guide on setting up call forwarding with Asterisk.

Having bought a cheap voice over IP phone (Budgetone 101, sell for around £50 on eBay) I decided to stick Asterisk on the Debian box. What a fantastic bit of software! Asterisk works on the principle that when a phone call has been routed to a computer, you can do pretty much anything you like with it. By editing some flexible configuration files you can do simple things such as taking messages and call forwarding or more complex tasks such as redirecting calls to internal phones, DTMF menus, etc.

Asterisk now has a permanent home on my server, where it sits forwarding incoming calls to my Sipgate account to my mobile phone, for just 14p a minute, rather than the extortionate prices that UK telcos like to charge. If you want to explore Asterisk VoIP User has a useful forum and VoIP Info’s wiki also contains some good information.

Inspired by a conversation I overheard at work, I have recently been playing with Voice over IP telephony. VoIP is about to explode over here in the UK. By assigning an IP address to a phone, calls can be routed through computers using PBX software such as the excellent Asterisk. Once a call is handled by a computer pretty much anything can be done with it. One good example is VoIP User. They offer outbound calls to landlines around the world allowing its users to experiment with VoIP. It is completely funded by incoming calls made to the service. There are currently some restrictions such as 10 minute call limits to prevent abuse.

The big bonus of VoIP and the SIP/IAX protocols is that calls can be made directly between phones for free. Once it hits a critical mass of users, the current service providers are going to have to find something other than expensive call rates to offer their subscribers.