Operational differences

Users of K6BEN/R will have gotten used to how that repeater works - in particular, the use of 2 meter audio for coordination. I used to think it odd that the audio wasn't carried into the repeater as part of the uplink, but having used the repeater, it's clear that it's a fairly useful way to set things up. Someone other than the station sending video can be the source for te audio.

The first iteration of the D-ATV repeater won't have this ability: it will simply retransmit the MPEG TS uplinked by the user station. This means that coordination will have to take place via a traditional 2m or 70cm repeater. One thing that is planned for the future, though, is a shack camera going into an MPEG encoder. But that still would mean it would be a different stream than the one the user is transmitting. So you could watch yourself on TV, or listen to the 2m audio and watch the shack cam, but not both (unless you either decode both at the same time with a computer or multiple TVs).

On the plus side, however, the audio that's part of the MPEG encoding will be vastly higher quality than the narrowband FM we're used to. That may be useful in the context of events. Certainly, the ability to multiplex multiple programs and (when multiple receivers come), uplink multiple simultaneous streams will be very useful for events.