That is the problem with buying that ICOM JUNK!


D Star is a waste.

It was nothing more then a gimmick to sell more radios.
Some moron who confused public service radio - digital, with amateur radio - analog, and thought that they could improve upon the chicken egg.

The fact be told, public service never wanted to go digital.
They had to go digital to increase their overall bandwidth.

When they ran out of frequencies to use, they just narrow banded it, piggy backed the digital data next to the audio and thought that they somehow improved it.

When you remove deviation - you loose sound quality.
The thought was that if it was digital, it wouldn't matter, because digital is all 1's and 0's.

Tell that to the state trooper at the bottom of the hill that can't talk back to the barracks 5 miles away with a 150 watt radio.

The high band VHF - analog, worked just fine.
The digital UHF radio - no signal, no service.

Since noise is inverse the square of the frequency - using D Star doesn't make any sense on 2 meters!