At 11:18 AM 5/24/2012, you wrote:

All the time we have the entrenched view of
“this is my system and it won’t connect to
your system� we risk siloing and isolating
users. The net effect is less usage on amateur
bands and less amateurs – exactly the effect
that is being seen in many countries.

At the end of the day, all that the majority of
people want to be able to do is talk to their
friends around the world, and not have to jump
through political hoops to do so.

On the callsign ID, that is an interesting
point. Rules do vary from country to country,
but what I’ve found is that Amateurs naturally
ID every few minutes anyway. In the UK, rules
were relaxed on D-Star so that no voice ID is
required, but you will still typically here an
over start with “G6TBA from G4ULF� and end
with “from G4ULF.� Old habits die hard,
and I certainly ID on every over still.

Similar observations in Australia. However, for
us, this was always a non-issue, because
transmitter ID, not origin ID is the critical factor.

So, again, like you, I think these are both non-issues.

To me, the benefits in terms of increase usage
and more linking possibilities far outweigh these issues.Â

BTW, EchoIRLP does NOT allow interworking IRLP
and Echolink as the IRLP crowd insist on the
end-point being a repeater.   EchoIRLP
allows a repeater to act as an IRLP node and and
Echolink node, but it does not bridge the audio together.

This was one of the original design decisions,
though strictly speaking, there is a bridge
between the two at the protocol level, but it
takes place in the EchoIRLP node when running
Echolink. A copy of thebridge does act as a
local protocol translator between Echolink and
IRLP/Speak Freely (some control functions and
audio transport layer), so the IRLP software can
remain in control of the audio path, as well as
provide sensible status reports to both networks as needed.

73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL
http://vkradio.com