After reading the discussion on 'Dstar and Emcomms' on the eham's Emergency Communications forum, I posted the following comment. Since I had planned to post here on the same topic, why waste time writting it again.
From my reading of the comments on this forum, it appears that many assume that DStar infrastructure is only the repeaters and link to the internet. I consider the actual physical DStar radios in the hands of hams to be the most important part of the infrastructure. If you don't have radio's to talk to others, there is no communications.
Looking at some crude numbers, there appears to be about 700,000 licensed hams in the US and about 22,000 repeaters. This works out to about 32 hams per repeater, assuming every ham gets on a repeater. From the ICOM offers, it appears that they feel that you need 10 users minimum to keep a DStar repeater on the air. My quick and dirty count showed about 300 DStar repeaters in the US. At 10 users per repeater that works out to about less that 0.5% of the US ham population. With 32 users per repeater, market penetration goes up to almost 1.5% of the US ham population with approximately 10,000 DStar radios. If the adage that "The first thing every ham does when he receives his license is to buy a two meter handheld." is true, two meter FM probably has greater than 90% market penetration.
Questions that need to be considered are;
1. How many DStar equipped hams could you turn out in a disaster situation including consideration that only 25% of your group will be available in a disaster?
2. How many of your government and other served agencies have DStar equipment installed as compared to VHF/UHF FM?
3. How many DStar radios can ARRL provide under their HAMAID program to a disaster scene?
4. How many of the walk-in or mutual aid hams will have DStar radios with them?
5. How many owners of DStar radios will be willing to leave their expensive radios behind when their shift ends?
Having gotten in to ham radio when the AM/SSB war had reached the point where the technical superiority of SSB was being accepted, it still took almost 10 years and the availability of much less expensive SSB gear before SSB dominated the HF bands. Even so, most HF rigs today still include the ancient modulation mode.
In the ARES group that I am a member of, I am not aware of any members that have DStar capability. One or two may have DStar capable radios but have not seen any reason to spend the extra dollars to add the DStar board.
Until DStar has significant penetration in the ham population, basing an emergency communications plan on it would appear foolhardy at best.
zeke
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