D-Star - Part 1

A few years back I picked up an ICOM IC-92AD Handheld Transceiver (HT) after I first got my license.In the Cleveland area there was exactly one D-Star repeater that was in downtown Cleveland. It I took it half-way to the city I was able to hit if I was lucky. Eventually I realized that if I hooked up my HT that as running at 5W to the big antenna in the back yard I was able to connect to the repeater just fine.Before I get too much further, let me take a step back and talk about what the hell D-Star is in the first place. Sure, it runs on the same frequencies as normal FM, but it's not simple frequency modulation, but rather it works in the digital domain. It compresses speech to a 3.6 Kbps bit stream and then applies some error correction to it as well. To hear a digital communication that's all (or at least mostly) intact is to really hear the speaker's voice with no noise.The downside is that you get a falling-off-a-cliff effect. Once the error correction isn't enough to get around the error, you suddenly can't really hear a damn thing -- or worse you hear something like what you would expect from a R2 unit in Star Wars.Another advantage is that D-Star is really intended for interlinking with the rest of the world. It's like Echolink, but more-so. with only a bit of work I can broadcast nearly anywhere on the earth.The cool thing now is that I'm in range of four or five repeaters!Next: get the big antenna antenna up!