Ok, so I've been playing with Ramesh's Free*Star distribution.  And it got me to thinking…

I wonder, if you used an RTCM to take the analog signal off an Analog FM repeater from a D-Star transmitter (assuming you were coming off the discriminator at the repeater)…. And you pushed that audio across the internet back to your allstar box.  Now on a separate node, you used a URI to interconnect to a GMSK node adapter.  You then created a link between the RTCM and the URI/GSMK modem.  I wonder if all the timing/codec compression/decompression, etc would render the captured D-Star audio useless such that the URI to GMSK couldn't decode it? 

What I'm thinking is if you were running Free*Star on the same box as Allstar (or a separate one), potentially, you could then serve the data to the D-Star environments and back.  All using AllStar for *linking* thereby getting rid of this whole D-Star linking stuff (callsign hell)…. One thing I don't know is about DTMF to link setup, etc. (but let's ignore that for a minute).

There are obviously issues with separating the FM non-D-Star users from the D-Star uses at the repeater to route one to one RTCM and one to another.

I'm just wondering if anyone has wandered this path already and proved or dis-proved the potential theory?

Yeah, I know, I have way too much spare time on my hands…. But hey, it's ham radio right? :).

Alan