There are so many new modes and technologies in radio right now. Sometimes they start in ham radio and trickle into the rest of the world, but in this case, this stuff has started in the commercial world and trickled into amateur radio.
I played with the Mototrbo mode at Dayton this year, and while traveling to cities with repeaters using the mode. It is TMDA style modulation – and one repeater with the usual hardware allows for two completely separate QSOs to go on at the same time in a 12.5 khz slot. Networking and linking is very easy, and is all IP based. There is a national ham network with 40 or so sites across the world that I will be linking our new repeater into. In addition, there will be a local (non networked) timeslot that can carry a local QSO at the same time as networked traffic.
Stay tuned…But this is exciting stuff that is cutting edge radio. I’ve been playing with a couple of portables, but now a repeater is on the way for us to setup. For more info, check out this website. http://www.dmr-marc.net/
