“GE OM MIKE. HR BN HAM 64 YRS. DON'T CARE FOR DIGI ANYTHING. TOO MUCH FUN ON H.F. CW. HA.TKS FOR SITE AND INFO IN IT. '73 RICH KF9F”

“Mike, I fully agree with your D Star comment. My Yaesu FT991 has Fusion. Used it once with a local station, unpleasant compressed audio. I remember when FM simplex channels were busy but no need for more modes / channels today. Enjoyed the QRP contact on 40m today, forgot to ask which part of the I.O.W you were on ?”

“Sorry I did not intend to post the same reply 3 times, operator error... 😁”

“The audio quality is amazing, Q5 at 0 signal level is easily obtainable with digital. I won't says its true HiFi.. there is a slight roboticness to its sound, but you soon get used to that. I have heard better with some of the commercial PMR digital transmission but its 0 noise with your spoken audio is great. The one small drawback here though is if your in a fringe area to the repeater, instead of your audio fading into the noise floor you do tend to " drop off a cliff" with digital but the rf does seem to carry further with dig than it does with analogue fm, in a watts for miles type comparison. With digital You also transmit data at the same time as voice, people usually send their name and qth info, but you can also send your GPS location. Which you can read from the radios receiver. So you can have a bearing and distance away from the person you are talking to. The data transmission also allows you to send pictures or pc files whilst you are talking. The dstar protocol allows you to choose where to link or not link your repeater, by sending a simple data string. You can connect to another dstar repeater or one of the many chat rooms (reflectors ) which as said in an earlier reply could have an average of 60 or so other repeaters also linked in. So there is usually always someone to talk to. Andrew.”

“The audio quality is amazing, Q5 at 0 signal level is easily obtainable with digital. I won't says its true HiFi.. there is a slight roboticness to its sound, but you soon get used to that. I have heard better with some of the commercial PMR digital transmission but its 0 noise with your spoken audio is great. The one small drawback here though is if your in a fringe area to the repeater, instead of your audio fading into the noise floor you do tend to " drop off a cliff" with digital but the rf does seem to carry further with dig than it does with analogue fm, in a watts for miles type comparison. With digital You also transmit data at the same time as voice, people usually send their name and qth info, but you can also send your GPS location. Which you can read from the radios receiver. So you can have a bearing and distance away from the person you are talking to. The data transmission also allows you to send pictures or pc files whilst you are talking. The dstar protocol allows you to choose where to link or not link your repeater, by send a simple data string. You can connect to another dstar repeater or one of the many chat rooms (reflectors ) which as said in an earlier reply could have an average of 60 or so other repeaters linked. So there is usually always someone to talk to. Andrew.”

“The audio quality is amazing, Q5 at 0 signal level is easily obtainable with digital. I won't says its true HiFi.. there is a slight roboticness to its sound, but you soon get used to that. I have heard better with some of the commercial PMR digital transmission but its 0 noise with you spoken audio is great. You also transmit data at the same time as voice, people usually send their name and qth info, but you can also send your GPS location. Which you can read from the radios receiver. So you can have a bearing and distance away from the person you are talking to. The data transmission also allows you to send pictures or pc files whilst you are talking. The dstar protocol allows you to choose where to link or not link your repeater, by send a simple data string. You can connect to another dstar repeater or one of the many chat rooms (reflectors ) which as said in an earlier reply could have an average of 60 or so other repeaters linked. So there is usually always someone to talk to. Andrew.”

“Thanks for the info Andrew. Ill look into it in more depth. But I still cannot see why we need to split the already sparse number of VHF users into incompatible sub groups. I,d like to know, What real benefit does D-Star offer over FM that makes it worth the extra investment?”

“Dstar is not a closed system to only ICOM radios. Dstar was the creation of the JARL. Its is an open platform, only the vocoder used is the intellectual property of dvsi the company that builds the chip. There is a lot of homebrew and experiments going on in dstar. There are repeaters that only use a pc's soundcard, there are manufacturers who provide equipment to work dstar interfacing to your analogue radio. There are many many other hardware developers and experimenters where dstar is concerned Google dvrptr v1, or moencomm or dvmega or g4klx dstarrepeater or nw digital. So when your local FM repeater is quiet come join us on a mega reflector, when maybe 60 or so dstar repeaters, hotspots and nodes could be connected at any one time.. Andrew.”