K2AS Ham Radio

 For some strange reason I decided to stand up an XLX Reflector.  I followed The Modern Ham YouTube video on how to accomplish this.  That was the easy part. I have been on Fusion for 9+ years, and have installed a DR1-X and DR2-X repeater.  We have no internet at the repeater site, so I have had a RF Wires-X node running for 8.5 years at my QTH. Activity had been sporadic, except for a few early adopters.  There are a bunch of FM repeaters in the area.  Many of them are controlled by a few very dedicated and generous owners.  They have spent a lot of time and money gathering excellent surplus commercial equipment, getting good repeater sites, and building up controllers and infrastructure.  For the most part, they aren't too interested in digital at the moment. So digital voice has been slow to be adopted in my area.  It seems many have bought Fusion radios, only to not use the digital capability very often, if at all. So as a interesting pr...

  I have had Yaesu System Fusion radios since 2015, along with switching our club repeater W2XRX from an older GE analog system to a Yaesu DR1X in 2015, and then in 2020 a DR2X. I have had a Wires-X node online since November 2015. I obtained a Shark RF Openspot (a digital hotspot) when it first came out, maybe in 2018 or so. System Fusion is Yaesu’s implementation of digital voice. It is not proprietary, it’s specs have been published. So far, no other manufacturer has developed radios for it. Since then, I have acquired 2 FTM-400s, one FTM-100, one FT1XD, HT, one FTM-300, and one FT5DR HT. I use one FTM-400 as a PDN node, and the other is in my car. The FTM-100DR is dedicated to the W2XRX Wires-X node and the FTM-300 is my base station radio. What is a hotspot? Think of it as a small repeater that takes your signal and connects it to a digital voice network on the internet. So I have some experience with System Fusion/C4FM digital voice. I hadn’t experimented too much in cross-mo...