A few notes on System Fusion

[Matthew Stevens]

Thanks to Chris AA4CB for the great presentation on Fusion last night. Here are a couple of questions that were asked of me after the meeting, I thought I'd share the answers with the rest of the club in case others had the same questions.

Q: Can the callsign and distance information from transmitting Fusion stations be displayed on analog radios, once the repeater is operating in digital mode?

A: No. Fusion radios encode the users callsign into the transmitted digital signal. However, this information is only visible to other Fusion users.

Q: When the K4LKL repeater is switched to Auto Mode Select (AMS), will I still be able to hear digital users over my analog radio?

A: in a way, yes! AMS is the ability of Fusion repeaters and radios to automatically detect of a signal being received is analog or digital, and change modes to be able to properly decode that signal. What this boils down to with AMS on the repeater is: Digital in=digital out, Analog in=analog out. The magic happens when both the repeater and your Fusion radio are in AMS mode. In this mode, if the repeater "hears" a digital signal, it will automatically switch modes to re-transmit that digital signal. When this happens, all Fusion radios that are listening to the repeaters output will automatically detect the digital signal from the repeater, and switch to digital mode so you can hear the signal. The same thing happens with analog. If a non-Fusion user transmits into the repeater in analog mode, the repeater will automatically switch to analog output - and all Fusion radios will detect this analog signal and switch accordingly. This makes it as seamless as possible for Fusion users to talk to analog users over the same repeater.

Q: Can digital and analog users transmit on the repeater simultaneously?

A: No. Just like now, the repeater supports only one person talking through it at a time, no matter which mode they are using. If a digital user is transmitting through the repeater, an analog (or another digital) user will have to wait until the transmission is finished before he/she can use the repeater.

Q: Is there anything I need to change on my analog radio to support Fusion AMS mode on the repeater?

A: Yes. Once the repeater is changed to AMS mode, analog users will be best served by turning on the receive squelch tone function in their radios. This gives your radio a PL tone, just like the repeater has. This is so that when digital users are transmitting through the repeater, you won't have to listen to the noise of the digital transmissions (think of listening to an old dialup modem on a telephone line, or a fax machine...). This will not affect your ability to use your analog radio over the repeater, and will also not affect your ability to communicate with Fusion users via AMS. It will just allow you to hear other analog signals instead of the digital noise.

Hopefully this answers any questions people have about Fusion. If you have any other questions, or would like to see or hear one of the Fusion radios in action just let me know.


- Matthew KK4FEM
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