David,

 

Winlink has tried over the years to support all viable new technologies.  This has included Pactor 1, 2,3, 4,  WINMOR (which was developed by me for Winlink and provided to others free of charge) as well as VHF Packet and D-Star (128 K baud).

 

FYI Winlink is run by a small team (about 6 or so) of all volunteer programmers and administrators. The cost of running the Winlink system (servers, software, licenses etc) is all covered by private and a few corporate donors.   Of course the bulk of the Winlink infrastructure is provided by the hundreds of dedicated sysops (HF and VHF/UHF) donating their time and equipment.

 

I have offered source code (VB.NET and C.NET VS 2010) and help (coached) several other developers but unfortunately many do not have the skills or more likely the commitment to finish ports to other platforms and support those ports.  Debugging, documenting and supporting this kind of code does take a real commitment.

 

We fully support efforts like the Universal Digital Radio and plan to purchase several when they become available and will work to add this if at all possible to the protocols supported by Winlink and also hope to use it to provide non internet bridging across existing packet networks.  While the initial costs may seem high it is important to remember the production volume of ham radio specific hardware (like TNCs) is always small compared to commercial or consumer gear.   Hopefully with acceptance and volume costs can be driven down.  But we definitely need to push to expand this component of the Ham radio technology.

 

We look forwarding to evaluating the Universal Digital Radio and hope other volunteer programmers will be encouraged to help integrate it into the Winlink network.

 

Rick Muething, KN6KB  Winlink Development Team