About
Est. 1970 — married, with six kids. A licensed amateur radio operator and GMRS licensee, operating from Summerfield in the North Carolina piedmont. Licensed in November 2024 as KQ4WSV, now holding the vanity call W9APZ — Technician class, working HF, VHF and UHF. GMRS as WSFH657 for the family radios and around the property.
Digital modes — and why AllStarLink
I’ve spent time on D-STAR and DMR. Both are clever bits of engineering, and both are worth learning — but each one ties you to a particular flavour of radio talking to a particular network. Change hardware and you start over.
AllStarLink is where I settled, and the reason is simple: it doesn’t care what you own. It’s ordinary analogue FM over RF into a node you host yourself. Any radio that can hit your node can reach the world — no proprietary codec, no vendor’s network in the middle, and the repeater is yours.
Proof of the idea: most days I work the node with a Baofeng M5R, a handheld that costs less than dinner out. The expensive radios are lovely and they all still get used — but nothing on the node requires them.
Where to find me
Three repeaters, and it works out about an even split between them — any of the three is a fair bet.
K4JDR — Raleigh
441.725 MHz · analogue · AllStarLink node 42235, on the Carolina 440 UHF link system. My node 63683 stays permanently linked here.
W4GSO — Greensboro
442.8625 MHz (+) · D-STAR · covering the Piedmont Triad. Sponsored by the Greensboro Amateur Radio Association, of which I’m a member.
N4IV — Madison
147.345 MHz (+) · 103.5 Hz tone · analogue · the 2 m machine of the pack. Rockingham County, north of the Triad, sponsored by the Rockingham County Amateur Radio Club.
Nets
- Carolina 440 net — Mondays at 19:30
- North Carolina D-STAR net — Tuesdays at 21:00
Carolina 440 is a non-profit network of linked UHF repeaters covering large parts of North Carolina, supporting SKYWARN, AUXCOMM/ARES and public service events across the region.
Station
Base
- Icom IC-7100
HF / VHF / UHF all-band, all-mode transceiver
Mobile
- Icom ID-5100
Dual-band mobile — in the truck
Antenna
- Diamond X300A
Dual-band 2 m / 70 cm base vertical
Handhelds
- Kenwood TH-D75A
Tri-band, D-STAR and APRS - AnyTone AT-D878UVII
DMR and analogue, dual-band - TIDRADIO TD-H8
Dual-band - Baofeng M5R
Daily driver into the node - Baofeng UV-5R
The one everybody starts with
Infrastructure
- AllStarLink ASL3 on Raspberry Pi 5
- SimpleUSB radio interface
- Allmon3 dashboard
- Full transmission audio archive
Digital Modes
- D-STAR · DMR · APRS · AllStarLink
AllStarLink Node 63683
A full-duplex AllStarLink node running here in Summerfield. RF access is via an HSR USB Duplex Repeater hotspot — low power, local coverage for the station and the truck on the driveway. The interesting part is the link side: the node is open on AllStarLink, so anyone with a node can connect from anywhere in the world.
Being duplex rather than simplex matters more than it sounds. A simplex hotspot can’t hear anything while it’s transmitting, so on a busy hub you have to wait for it to drop before you can get a word in or send a DTMF command. Duplex transmits and receives at the same time — so you can break in like you would on a real repeater.
- Node number
- 63683
- Mode
- Full duplex
- RF interface
- HSR USB Duplex Repeater
- Audio IC
- CM-119B
- Channel driver
- SimpleUSB
- Host
- Raspberry Pi 5 · NVMe · ASL3
How to Connect
Licensed amateurs are welcome. From your own AllStarLink node:
; connect, transceive *3 63683 ; monitor only *2 63683 ; disconnect *1 63683
Please identify with your callsign and leave a pause between transmissions so linked systems can key up.