Can You Use D-Star Amateur Radio in Android Phone?

Can You Use D-Star Amateur Radio in Android Phone?

D-STAR stands for Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio, a digital voice and data protocol specification for amateur radio developed by the Japan Amateur Radio league. D-STAR enabled radios, mostly from Icom, can connect with D-STAR repeaters if available in the region. There is only one D-STAR repeater, that too under construction, in India. In regions where a D-STAR repeater is not available, dongles for connecting D-STAR enabled radios to the computer which in turn can connect globally over the internet can be used. A similar option is the RS-MS1A application available on Google Play, which allows your Android device to remotely use some of the D-STAR and DV mode functions of some D-STAR radios.

DV mode is digital voice communication at 4.8kbps. There is a DD or digital data mode for Icom D-STAR radios on 1.2 GHz amateur band which is capable of sending and receiving data at 128 kbps. There is also provision for sending data up to 950bps in the DV mode operation for details like callsign, short data message or GPS position with a voice message.

D-STAR has a call sign squelch function which opens the squelch only when your call sign is received. This way you can receive calls intended for you only. Similarly, a call over a D-STAR repeater can be made to a desired station by setting the repeater call sign and desired station call sign in the menus. For making calls to remote D-STAR repeaters over the internet gateway, D-STAR repeater call sign and IP address must be registered to the gateway server. There could be restrictions based on specific country regulations.

Voice is converted to digital format in D-STAR radios using a codec embedded on a microchip. AMBE (Advanced Multi-Band Excitation format) codec is a proprietary portion of the D-STAR radios. There is an application known as DroidStar in Google Play which is open source. It is mentioned that it connects M17, DMR, D-STAR and several others and is compatible with all AMBE USB devices. M17 is a team of radio amateurs developing new digital radio protocol for data and voice for amateur radio. They are a multi-national group of open source software and hardware enthusiasts.