Het is alweer 4 maanden geleden dat we een bericht geplaatst hebben over de CS7000 van Connect Systems. In de tussentijd is de CS700 uit gefaseerd en geüpgraded naar de CS750. Om toch te kunnen voldoen aan de vraag naar radio’s met een kleurenscherm is Connect Systems de MD850 van Tytera gaan leveren. De CS7000 moet een revolutionaire radio worden met DStar, DMR, C4FM, dPMR, NXDN en P25 aan boord. Dit allemaal in dezelfde behuizing als de CS750. Helaas is de levering van de radio al 10 maanden uitgesteld en veel amateurs lijken de kans op levering op te geven. Toch geeft Jerry Wanger, CEO van Connect Systems aan dat het project springlevend is. In een bericht van 7 augustus geeft hij aan:

“There has been much rumors about the status of the CS7000and the CS8000. It is still an active project but has taking much longer thanexpected. First you have to understand what the scope of the original projectwas and why there has been such a delay.The original project was going to take the CS750, take outthe firmware DVSI Vocoder and replace it with a hardware vocoder from DVSI. Wealso had to optimize the A/D and D/A anti-aliasing filters going to and fromthe baseband circuitry to allow better fidelity when encoding and decodingdigital signals. Those details were done over a year ago. The manufacturer of the CS750 expected to complete the DMRfirmware over a year ago which is the firmware basis of the CS7000. Thisproject is now almost done although we have another month or two to completesome of the enhancements I promised for the CS750 such as keypad programming. From a firmware development standpoint, I now had tointegrate the DMR radio the manufacturer has designed with DSTAR code other peoplehave designed. This is a relatively simple project and something that shouldnot take more than about six months. So the question you are asking is why havewe not finished it yet?The first roadblock was not being able to have the DMR partfinished. This roadblock is now almost removed as we make the last firmwareadjustment to provide a stable working DMR radios.  The second roadblock was the A/D and D/Acircuitry of the microphone and speaker. The A/D and D/Acircuitry is within a part inside the radio we call the C5000. This is thebaseband chip for the DMR processing and includes the A/D and D/A circuitry forthe microphone and speaker. Part of the CS750 keyboard programming project thatI am working on includes the ability to record and playback messages from theradio. The manufacturer told me I will get the firmware to do that sometimebetween late this week and next week. After I get that firmware the last knownroadblock will be solved and I can get back on the CS7000 project again.While I will not give a firm completion date, I canconfidentially say I will be able to get back on the CS7000 project within twomonths and hopefully be able to get prototypes working for DMR, DSTAR, andAnalog about six months after that.The other protocols that we will work on such as Fusion,NXDN, and P25 is much more complicated than D-STAR and I will not give even anestimated date of completion. As I said in earlier post, there is a possibilitythe existing hardware might not even support those other protocols but we willnot know until we try.Jerry Wanger KK6LFS”.