D-Star

The Beauty of White Space – D-Star Not Getting Beyond the Repeater

While testing a new hotspot on a radio that I thought I’d used with D-Star before, traffic could be heard on the local hotspot, but could not get out to the world. Assuming the To field had been set to Local CQ where a gateway wasn’t used which keeps traffic on the local repeater, that setting was checked. It was using Gateway CQ. Hmmmm. After thinking a bit about the symptom, a realization came to me that it was acting as if my call sign wasn’t registered for D-Star which limits traffic to local repeaters. Maybe the My Station call sign was incorrect. Looking at the My Station setting revealed that my call sign was correct. What could this be? In desperation, the My Station entry was deleted and added back. It worked! Pulling up the Icom programming software and looking at the setting for My Station showed that there was a leading space before my call sign! Arggghhhh.