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Mixed Signals from Yaesu
29 December 2011 | by This just in from the Things That Make You Go Hmmm Department: the amateur radio portion of Yaesu splits from Mother Motorola while the land mobile portion stays. This is right on top of an announcement that Yaesu will pursue a digital amateur radio offering based on land mobile technology (i.e., definitely not D-STAR).
The K0KDS blog has a post about the split, so go there for the full story. The ARRL has this news item about the organizational change. Here’s the paper that Yaesu published about their move into digital technology for amateur radio.
73, Bob K0NR
2 Responses to “Mixed Signals from Yaesu”
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What does it really matter?
I’m glad Yaesu is finally doing something in this area, but their presentation is very focused on the modulation technique and barely mentions the protocol. The protocol is the big issue with D-STAR in my opinion, and Yaesu could have the best modulation system in the world but without a robust, scalable, and open protocol that gets widely adopted, it’s useless. The amateur radio protocol comparison chart on page 15 is puzzling. It doesn’t make the case at all for C4FM in my opinion (4.8 kbs versus 9.6 kbs….weeee) and is very unpersuasive. I’d love for Yaesu to take a leading role in VHF/UHF digital (I’m a Yaesu fan), but this effort unfortunately looks like more of an attempt to retool LMR products for amateur radio and not a cutting-edge progressive technology initiative.