D-Star: If We Don’t Build It, They Won’t Come.
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D-Star: If We Don’t Build It, They Won’t Come. | Pearl's Paradise
In the movie “Field of Dreams” Shoeless Joe Jackson lurked just beyond the edge of the cornfield ringing Kevin Costner’s fictional Iowa home. Until the diamond was complete, the field perfectly striped, manicured, and groomed, Shoeless Joe and his 1919 Black Sox exiles remained out of sight, out of mind.
Such is the state of D-Star implementation in the Ham Radio community. Commercial-grade equipment from Icom sits on store shelves gathering dust while radios purchased by early-adopters churn their way through eBay, eHam.net, Craig’s list, and a host of other online swap meets. The hype machine from Icom kicked into high gear with the release of the first commercially available digitally-equipped Ham radios. Early adopters who had long sought a digital alternative to analog bandwidth-hogging technology jumped on the crazy train. The rest of the legacy-bound Ham community let go with a collective “yawn!”
D-Star’s detractors are both vocal and prolific. “It’s too complicated.” “It’s a closed system based on a proprietary protocol.” “It’s too expensive.” “Nobody really needs digital.” “It’s a solution in search of a problem.” “I sound like R2D2 if I go out of range of the repeater.”
Then there is perhaps the single biggest hurdle to adoption. “There just aren’t enough D-Star repeaters in my area. When FM repeaters are already falling silent, why are we even worrying about D-Star?”
You just can’t get geeked-up over digital communications if there aren’t any digital repeaters within shouting distance.
The truth is that many of these complaints are legitimate. Drawing battle lines between the pro-D-Star and anti-D-Star forces in a copycat replay of the Beta -vs- VHS wars misses the point. As someone squarely in the pro-D-Star camp I can speak honestly to my brethren. D-Star has its warts. It’s time for us to accept that reality and make a more compelling case to our non-D-Star compadres as to why adoption is to their benefit in specific and ham radio in general.
There is no getting around this first truth. D-Star is indeed complicated. Whereas with analog FM communications you need only know the repeater frequency, CTCSS tone, and frequency split, in D-Star you need to know the call sign of the repeater you are accessing as well as the precise spacing of the call sign and “node address” you are programming. The first time I programmed my D-Star radio – even knowing all the call signs and spacing required – it took me more than an hour to make my first successful contact. The second repeater I tried to enter took another 20 to 30 minutes just to get all the parameters entered properly and tested thoroughly.
With D-Star it is no longer enough to dial up a frequency and hear “W3XYZ Repeater System” ring back. No, now you must pre-program your radio with your call sign, the call sign of the repeater, and the node you are attaching to on the D-Star repeater stack. Interestingly, the D-Star gurus who came up with the standard labeled their repeater node arrangement with the seemingly child-like A, B, and C. Unfortunately, A = 1.2Ghz, B = 440Mhz, and C = 144Mhz. To put not too fine a point on it, who decided that 1.2Ghz was the most popular band and deserved the “A” rating? For people who read left-to-right (the majority of the world’s linguists) the logic seems bass-ackwards and counterintuitive.
And let’s not forget all the global interlinking going on between D-Star gateway systems scattered across the world. Figuring out how to jump from system to system adds its own measure of complexity to the digital stew.
Complicating D-Star adoption further – and in spite of Icom’s assertions to the contrary – D-Star is indeed a proprietary communications platform. Icom may argue that D-Star is based on allegedly “open” Japanese Amateur Radio League standards, but by leveraging the “proprietary” AMBE voice-encoding protocol and patenting the required necessary codec chip-set they have essentially closed the standard to competition. You want to compete with Icom’s D-Star juggernaut with a D-Star system of your own? Get ready to bow, cash in hand, at the feet of Icom to pay the royalties you will owe on every chip set you purchase from them. The D-Star specification may be in the public domain but the way Icom leaped to the fore with its implementation put most manufacturers in the position of paying homage to their main competition. Is it any wonder Yaesu, Alinco, and Kenwood are dragging their feet in creating D-Star radios of their own?
Devotees of the relatively more open APCO25 digital standard used by most first responder systems in America emphasize that they face none of the D-Star-esque proprietary hurdles under their favorite platform. True, but there are also no amateur radio manufacturers producing any APCO25 equipment in a form usable by the majority of today’s “appliance” operators. Like it or not, APCO25 fanboys, it’s a standard that is going nowhere fast in the Ham world. Unless you can buy the hardware off the store shelf, the standard just isn’t going to gain traction.
Yet availability alone is no guarantee of success. You can pickup D-Star equipment at just about any Amateur Radio retailer. From the V-series single-band 2m handhelds to the top-of-the-line 1.2Ghz ID-1, Icom has a full line of gear just ripe for the taking. So why aren’t more people on the bandwagon?
D-Star equipment remains prohibitively expensive for the majority of Amateur Radio operators, especially in today’s economic climate. What is the cost of a basic analog-only dual-band mobile radio? $280.00 will buy you a nice, one-band-at-a-time Icom IC-208H, the radio on which the D-Star equipped ID-800H is based. The price of the ID-800H? $450.00 after discounts. But that doesn’t even begin to come close to the more than double price premium expected out of those who go for the upscale IC-2820H radio with the add-on D-Star module. That baby will set you back nearly $900.00. The next closest advanced, analog-only radio from competitor Kenwood, although with the added features of APRS in the mix, comes in at under $500.00.
And don’t get me started on the price of D-Star repeaters. Forget homebrewing a decent repeater system and self-programming a controller. D-Star repeaters are strictly the domain of commercial-grade heavyweights with serious coin to lay on the counter.
A prevalent myth, however, is the notion that D-Star is a solution in search of a problem. On this score I simply can’t jump in with the D-Star bashing faithful. Band over-crowding, especially in the 144Mhz range, is a legacy of 25khz bandwidth spacing necessary on analog signals. D-Star’s bandwidth? 6khz including the 950bps data sub-stream that comes along for the ride on every voice transmission. On the count of pure bandwidth efficiency, D-Star wins the day. It isn’t even close. You can fit three D-Star signals in the space of just one analog signal. Digital communications are simply more bandwidth efficient, including simultaneous-data features analog-only radios can only dream of.
Like the proverbial Field of Dreams D-Star’s biggest hurdle to adoption has less to do with technical merit, cost, or even bein a solution in search of a problem, and everything to do with the simple matter of availability. Without a ballfield on which to play, the ghostly apparitions of Shoeless Joe and his friends had no reason to come out of the cornfield. This, too, appears the strongest source of inertia blocking wide-scale D-Star adoption. There simply aren’t enough decent, local ball fields on which to play the digital game.
In the Philadelphia area we have precisely two D-Star repeater systems on line. Sometime later this year or early next, more will come on line as a part of a grant from the Southeastern PA DHS Task Force. For now there are only two. One of the two is located in wealthy, well-endowed, and leading-edge Chester County. The other system (K3PDR) is located near the Philadelphia / Montgomery County border in southeastern Montgomery County. Though the K3PDR repeater has a decent footprint according to computer models, neither is a prime location for a wide-area footprint throughout the Philadelphia region and neither seems to be all that busy with enthusiast traffic on any given day.
(To be fair, the Chester County system is dedicated to Emergency Communications, not hobbyist thrills. The relative dearth of traffic is noticeable nonetheless.)
With just two repeaters on the air, and with large numbers of Hams scattered throughout the hilly country surrounding Philadelphia, is it any wonder why D-Star’s embrace, including support of the price premium expected out of early adopters, has been glacially slow in our region? It makes me wonder whether similar such stories elsewhere are a contributing factor to D-Star’s slow up-take nationally.
D-Star is a wonderful tool, too complicated to dive into without some mentoring but with significant merit worthy of the inquisitive ham’s consideration. Until more repeater clubs make the switch and force both a lowering of Icom’s prices as well as an opening of the standard to cost-competition among Icom’s corporate foes, D-Star’s adoption will remain tepid and cautious. Merely having analog capabilities on the radio is not justification enough for most hams to bear the significant price premium required to breath the rarified D-Star air.
I’m looking for a ball field to play on with my D-Star powered ball, glove, and bat. I wonder how many others who considered D-Star briefly and shied away feel the same way?
