Tag: D-STAR

How to automatically link your Pi-Star hotspot to D-Star or YSFReflectors

system cron details

I noticed recently that sometimes my D-Star based MMDVM Pi-Star hotspot would unlink itself overnight from any reflector it was linked to and I decided to investigate and see if I could work out a way to automatically link it to a reflector. If I can’t stop my Pi-Star MMDVM from disconnecting then at least […]

DMR – My thoughts about Digital Mobile Radio

TYT MD-380 DMR UHF handheld

I’ve written a couple of times in the past about various digital voice modes and if I’m honest, I’ve been quite scathing of them.  I make no secret of the fact that I’m very happy to use repeaters for local natter but don’t like the idea of linking remote repeaters together via the internet to […]

Are you transmitting illegally on 70cms?

An interesting subject came up on our 70cms voice repeater earlier today following an incident on a local DMR box yesterday and it got me thinking. There are a lot of 70cms repeaters in the UK with input frequencies between 430 MHz and 431 MHz and many people don’t realise that our licence only allows […]

How to replace the noisy fan in an Icom ID-5100 with a much quieter one

Inside of the Icom ID-5100 showing the new fan in place

I’m a happy owner of two Icom ID-5100 radios, one is mounted in the car and I use the other one in the shack on low power for working the local repeaters.  It doesn’t get much use but I’m monitoring GB3CL and GB7TE most of the time. About the only thing which I don’t like about this […]

Revisiting D-STAR and the GB7TE repeater

Back in March 2011 I wrote about three different modes of communications, EchoLink, D-STAR and QSONet. In that piece, I discounted all of them and although I said that D-STAR was the one which most interested me, I wasn’t planning on using it due to a lack of any D-STAR repeaters nearby. Fast forward to earlier […]

EchoLink, D-Star and QSONet (CQ100)

EchoLink EchoLink software allows licensed Amateur Radio stations to communicate with one another over the Internet, using streaming-audio technology.  The program allows worldwide connections to be made between stations, or from computer to station, greatly enhancing Amateur Radio’s communications capabilities.  There are more than 200,000 validated users worldwide — in 162 of the world’s 193 nations […]