Wires-X Bridged Networks

The rooms that found a way out — and the identical kludge they all landed on.

Yaesu’s Wires-X is a closed network. You cannot reach a Wires-X room with a hotspot, there is no published protocol to link into, and the license agreement forbids modifying the software. That story is told in full on the Wires-X page.

And yet a handful of the busiest Wires-X rooms in the world are reachable from DMR, D-STAR, NXDN, AllStar, and a twenty-dollar hotspot. Their operators did not find a loophole. Every one of them, independently, arrived at exactly the same solution: park a Yaesu radio inside the room, point a second radio or hotspot at it on an RF frequency, and let the audio cross the gap over the air.

That convergence is the interesting part. When a dozen clever people working separately all build the same ugly bridge, it is strong evidence that no better bridge exists.

The Networks

These are the major bridged rooms. The pattern is always the same: a Wires-X room number that only Yaesu gear can reach, and beside it a YSF or FCS reflector that anyone can reach.

Note: “Not published” means the value was not found in public sources, not that it does not exist. Several of these rooms are run by people who have never put up a website, and their names simply are not written down anywhere. If you know who they are, I would be glad to correct this page. Reflector IDs and talkgroups change — always confirm with the network’s own site before programming a radio.

CQ-UK — the room that became a network

The largest and most thoroughly bridged of them all. CQ-UK is not really a room any more; it is a network with a room at its center, running its own YSF reflector, an XLX transcoding server, an HBlink3 DMR server, and an independent DMR master, reaching outward to Brandmeister, Phoenix, TGIF, FCS, YCS, EuropeLink, FreeSTAR, Peanut, AllStar, and even Zello and Teamspeak.

Stuart Priestley, M0SGS (SK), created room 27793 in 2017 and built it into one of the busiest on the entire Wires-X network — at its peak, reportedly the fourth busiest room in the world. Ernie Pratt, GM7KBK, hosts it today and runs the infrastructure around it, along with the help site at cq-uk.co.uk. A questions-and-answers net runs Mondays at 18:45 GMT.

SkyHubLink — the one that shows its work

A Colorado-based system spanning repeaters from Denver to Steamboat Springs, Pueblo, and into Wyoming, with a linked machine as far away as Spokane. Wires-X room 46361, YSF 92722, DMR talkgroup 310847, plus AllStar and analog FM all bridged through a central hub server.

SkyHubLink is a 501(c)(3) with a real board behind it. Jack Roland, KEØVH, is president and operations manager; Skyler Fennell, WØSKY, is chief engineer (and was Amateur Radio Newsline’s Young Ham of the Year in 2016); Jeremy Lincicom, WØJRL, engineers the AllStar side. And the system has a man whose actual title is Wires-X Systems Engineer — Bill “Bucky” Buckwalter, WØSUN. When a network is large enough, bridging the walled garden becomes somebody’s job.

They also deserve credit for documenting the kludge plainly. Their own site states that Wires-X “cannot be directly linked to other modes, so a bridge must be used,” and describes exactly how theirs works: the Wires-X room is joined to the system via a YSF node radio permanently locked to 448.350 MHz. A radio, on a frequency, listening to another radio.

One practical warning they repeat loudly, and it applies to most of these networks: turn Wires-X passthrough OFF on your hotspot when connected via YSF. Using the radio’s Wires-X button to change reflectors while on a bridged reflector causes disconnects and link problems. Change reflectors from the Pi-Star web interface instead.

SouthEast Link — the most promiscuous bridge

Wires-X room 43389, and sensibly, YSF reflector 43389 to match. Also FCS002-89, FCS003-89, and YCS314 on DG-ID 56.

What sets SouthEast Link apart is reach: it bridges into Wires-X, YSF, FCS, SRF, D-STAR, NXDN, EchoLink, and AllStar. Almost nothing in amateur digital voice is outside its walls.

It is sponsored and maintained by LMARC, the Lookout Mountain Amateur Radio Club (N4LMC), whose repeater systems are homed to the room. A club effort rather than one operator’s garage project — which may be exactly why it reaches further than the rest.

CQ-IRELAND — built out of frustration

The most honest origin story of the group. CQ-IRELAND was established to link the Galway repeater EI2TBR and the Salthill gateway EI2SHD, and to gather Irish C4FM users in one place. It did not work — in the group’s own telling, stations from elsewhere would occasionally call in but “seldom got a response as there were very few linked to the Node.”

So they bridged it. YSF node IE.YSF.IRELAND went in specifically so hotspot users could reach the room, followed by DMR talkgroup 2724, D-STAR reflector XLX353 E, and a Peanut room. Three modes into one place, and the activity followed. That is the whole argument for bridging, stated plainly by people who learned it the hard way.

The work is credited to Steve Wright, EI5DD, and Dermot Gleeson, EI2GT, with the Galway VHF Group. Dermot built the Wires-X ground station that linked the Woodcock Hill repeater in — a job the group describes as being thrown in at the deep end, since it is not an easy system to set up.

CQ North Dakota — and what it cost to build

Jake Bechtold, KØRQ, runs room 62208, with a matching YSF reflector at the same number and a YCS311 link courtesy of Mike Norrbom, NØVZC. The room itself is hosted by the NDSU Amateur Radio Society on the WØHSC repeater in Fargo.

It is on this list less for its size than for its documentation. Jake wrote up what building the bridge actually took: a spare FTM-100 in PDN mode, a dedicated computer, and — because Yaesu firmware updates broke Pi-Star’s callsign decoding for remote gateways — two Pi-Star hotspots on a transmit/receive frequency split, before he eventually discovered an OpenSpot could manage it in simplex. It took, in his words, multiple evenings of frustration. It has run for years since.

America Link — the biggest of them all

Wires-X room 21080, and by a wide margin the largest room on this page. At the time of writing its YSF reflector shows 437 connected gateways — repeaters, hotspots, and nodes from Japan, Australia, Israel, Brazil, Moldova, Trinidad, the Netherlands, Britain, and every corner of the United States, all in one room.

Unlike CQ-UK or SkyHubLink, America Link has no public website and publishes no roster, which makes it oddly anonymous for something so large. But the bridge itself is not anonymous at all. Watch the reflector’s dashboard for a few minutes and every transmission arriving from the Wires-X side — the ones whose target string still carries the room number 21080 — passes through a single gateway: N5YX. That is Grant Stuart, N5YX, and that gateway is the door.

One correction worth noting, because it is the number trap in action: America Link’s YSF reflector is currently 32592, not the 89804 figure still quoted in older guides. If a number on this page does not work, trust the reflector list over the article.

Two More Names

Several of these networks — CQ-UK, SouthEast Link, CQ North Dakota — run on YCS, a newer C4FM reflector architecture that handles YSF, FCS, and IMRS from a single server and makes this kind of multi-mode bridging far less painful than it used to be.

YCS is the work of Kurt Baumann, OE1KBC. He does not operate any of the rooms above, but a good deal of what they do is possible because of software he wrote and gave away.

And when you pull up the dashboard of almost any YSF reflector on this page — the connected-gateway list, the last-heard log, the little CPU temperature readout — you are looking at YSFReflector-Dashboard2, written by Shane Daley, M0VUB. Neither man runs a room. Both of them made the rooms possible. That deserves saying out loud.

What This Tells Us

Nine networks, four countries, and not one of them found a software solution. Every single bridge in the list above ends in a Yaesu radio transmitting over the air to something else, because Yaesu left no other door.

There is a lesson in that about closed systems. The wall did not stop anyone — the traffic gets through, the nets run, the newcomers with hotspots turn up and are made welcome. What the wall accomplished was to make every one of these operators buy an extra radio, dedicate a computer, burn a frequency pair, and spend evenings they will not get back debugging one-way audio.

The bridges exist because hams are stubborn. They are ugly because they had to be.

A noncommercial hobby reference compiled by N6JET, gathered from public sources and shared freely. These networks are operated independently and are not affiliated with N6JET. Wires-X and System Fusion are products of Yaesu Musen Co., Ltd. Room numbers, reflector IDs, and talkgroups change — always confirm with the operating network before programming a radio.