W9APZ

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: the Kenwood TH-D75A is my daily carry, but the handheld that talks to the node here at the house is a Baofeng M5R — one that costs less than dinner out. The good radios are lovely and they all get used; the node just doesn’t ask for 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.

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

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

Live status

This panel is text only — it refreshes every few seconds from AllStarLink’s stats API. It shows whether someone is talking, not the audio itself. To actually hear the node, see below.

How to actually hear it

There is no audio player on this page. AllStarLink carries the audio over its own protocol, not as a web stream, so listening means running a client that speaks it — not a browser. Two easy options:

• DVSwitch Mobile (Android) or Repeater Phone (iOS) — connect as an IAX client and you get full two-way audio. Ask me for credentials.
• Any AllStarLink node — connect to 63683 and listen from your own radio.
• iaxRpt (Windows) — the desktop IAX client hams moved to after AllStarLink’s browser-based Web Transceiver stopped working. That one was a Java applet; no current browser can run it.

Live network map

Want to see what 63683 is talking to right now? AllStarLink draws the map fresh on every request, so it is never stale — out through the K4JDR backbone in Raleigh, up to the Cape Fear hub in Wilmington, and across the Carolinas. Click below and it will generate the current diagram for you.

Show me the live network map →

Live node statistics → The hotspot hardware →

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.