[chirp_devel] Mode designator for YSF?

[Dan Smith]

> I can try but don't want to claim correctness on this, nor to know how 
> things should be done best. And I don't want to fight over this :-).

Hah, I don't want to fight, I just want to make a good decision about how we can support this without having to change course later. Thanks for the brain dump. Even though I'm not sure we agree on the conclusion, I think the discussion is good to make sure we don't make a decision that we have to change later. Please interpret the below as critical design discussion and not fighting :)

> The 
> radio that I played with could be set to one of: FM, DN, VW, AMS. This 
> is the interactive setting used when operating; I am not sure whether 
> this also corresponds to the choice available when programming (I'm not 
> using any of those digital modes).

Yeah, this seems really confusing to me. I have an FT3 to play with, and I see that it lets you select FM, DN, or Auto for the transmit mode on the radio. Similarly in Yaesu's software you can select these three for a given channel. However, in their software for the FT2 and FT1 (which are basically identical in memory layout) there is no such option. The manuals for those radios seem to indicate that the behavior on the radio itself is the same, but I can't figure out why their software won't let you choose that. And, even though I can select VW in a separate place in the radio, the FT3 software seems to have zero mention of it.

I've decoded the bits for AMS, FM, DN but because of the above discrepancy I'm not sure if I should expose those to the FT1 and FT2, or keep it in the FT3 subclass. Is it possible that Yaesu just didn't implement knobs for the digital settings in their new (at the time) flagship digital radios?

> AMS is the automatic mode that picks 
> the "right" one of the other tree. I find this to be a sensible choice 
> for multimode repeaters, but not everybody agrees: Some people only want 
> to hear the digital traffic, others only the analog traffic and they 
> would set their radio accordingly. AMS is also a bit annoying since it 
> changes your transmit mode to whatever was last used on the repeater. 
> This is cool because you are automatically responding in the same mode 
> that somebody used for calling, but then again if you want to call, you 
> always have to check your settings first to ensure you are on the 
> desired mode. There is, however, a setting that allows you to set the 
> default for that. (E.g. RX AMS, TX always FM). I don't remember if this 
> is per-channel but that works for me.

This (the TX preference) is also not set-able in their software. I haven't checked to see if it's a per-channel setting when stored on the radio though.

> ['FM', 'AMS', 'DN', 'VW']

I guess I'm not sure this is the best plan. Seems to me that "AMS" is really a behavior of the radio, in that it will change your mode between FM and DN based on the last received signal. Further, "VW" doesn't seem like a mode to me. It's still the same modulation, but with more voice data and less data data, more akin to transmit bandwidth on an HF radio or something. And especially since you don't control whether you receive VW or not (right?) it also doesn't seem like a mode to me.

I'd also hate to add "AMS" as a mode in chirp's master list, since it's a behavior. Some other radio could use AMS to mean "FM or D-STAR" and Yaesu themselves could do something like add DMR to these radios and AMS would switch between all three depending on the received signal. The modes need to be pretty stable in their meanings, as that's how we determine if you can copy/paste a memory between two radios. If they both consider "AMS" to be a mode, but one means "FM or DN" and the other means "FM or AM", that's not going to help anyone.

> - Using a checkbox for DN vs. VW imposes some kind of default and I 
> don't see why chirp should suggest one over the other.

Well, VW seems to be off by default in the radio itself, and Yaesu's own software doesn't even appear to let you select it. I assume that means that it's a sort of demo-able feature, perhaps to make the audio sound good for presentations. How prevalent is the real-world usage?

> - In "Fusion",  the "F" in "YSF" refers to fusing digital and analog 
> into one thing. This was one of the marketing lines when the system was 
> introduced, allowing for a smooth transition to digital and all that. As 
> such, it was meant to describe the whole "digital plus analog together" 
> idea. Using that term to discriminate the digital part from the analog 
> part thus sounds wrong... But one could use 'Digital' instead of 'YSF' 
> in the second scheme.

Yeah, fair enough. I'd be more inclined to use "YSF" to mean "AMS" just because it's less generic. However, users looking at their radio, manuals, and Yaesu's own software will likely not intuitively know what it means.

I'm kinda surprised - this seems like a bit of a trainwreck, and more confusing than a digital-only D-STAR repeater to me. There is zero activity on my local YSF repeaters, but based on this, I kinda wonder if that activity would be a cacophony of people in both modes not really realizing when they're digital or not. Is it actually better in practice?

I definitely get your argument that assuming a default for AMS is imposing a preference on people, although it seems like that's Yaesu's intended default. So I guess it seems like if we add a DN mode to mean "Yaesu's C4FM format" and then flags for AMS or VW (with a default to Yes and No respectively), that's the right behavior, and keeps DN-supporting radios speaking the same language. If people cry foul at being defaulted to AMS, we could add a preference of some sort to control that. Even if that needs to change in the future, I think adding DN now so we can support repeaterbook YSF entries and general control of these radios is not something we'd have to remove/change later.

Does that seem okay, at least to start? Anyone else have information or an opinion on this?

--Dan