Went in to HRO Portland yesterday to buy a replacement ID-51A+ (sold my dongle & 1st gen 51A a few years ago when I was bored with DStar) and saw that the UHF 31A are marked down to $199.99. Don't know how many they have or if they'll do phone orders but $199.99 is good price. Not on their website at that price. Maybe worth calling if you were looking for one.



As a side note, I discovered that the RF black hole that is my house strikes again. Analog repeaters are no problem provided they are to the SE of my house. 5W will make it 60+ miles using an external antenna. Any other direction? Smoke signals or brute strength from a 2m mobile being used as a base radio.


DStar? Nope. Not even with an external antenna or the SRH77 I bought yesterday. I can just manage to get a repeater 32 miles away on 440mhz to acknowledge me but nobody can understand shit I'm saying. Waiting for Gigaparts to send me a DVmega RPI. Should have ordered it before I bought the HT. Oh well

Thanks for the heads up!

No problem. While everyone seems to poo-poo the 31 because it's single band, it is just right for someone who wants to have a rig dedicated to hotspot use. I was poking around some reflector dashboards (testing to see if they heard my feeble cries here in the boonies) and it seems that the use of hotspots has exploded since I last used DStar. Makes sense given how cheap a Raspberry Pi and DVmega RPI is. No reason to tie up a local repeater or in my case, just the thing when you can't access an local repeater.

Yeah, I have an ID-51A+ and have never used it on 2 meters, and I only used it on a repeater once or twice (and never worked anybody on a repeater). I do use it every day with a DV access point either in my house or in my car.
A $199 UHF D-Star HT would be all I need.
In fact, on my ID-51A+, I have the smallest possible antenna on it since I only talking within my house or car; I can't even hear any local repeaters with the antenna I am using.

When you get that DVMega/RPI,  look at getting the Hardened Power Systems box for it. Even if you never take it out of the house it is way cool. Very nicely done.

I've talked to a few guys and watched the DHAP videos on YouTube. I'm sold. Just waiting for the RPi to show up and smoke testing it before I invest in the DHAP and a hotspot. According to one guy who uses his RPi daily, he manages just fine with a 1Gb prepaid account from Verizon every month.

 

While everyone is jumping into YSF or DMR, I think D-Star has finally matured enough to be useful. I don't think it'll be going anywhere anytime soon. I'll give DMR a shot once they iron out all the issues and the DV4mini is more widely available/adopted.

I have a UHF DVAP in the house running off a Raspberry Pi. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't buy a DVAP. They are too expensive now that there are other devices available for a lot less money that do exactly the same thing. But, the DVAP works great and I have never had a moment's trouble from it. The second day I owned it, I set it on a shelf and never touched it again. It runs 24/7. Something kind of interesting about this set-up: it is sitting on a shelf with an antenna from an HT on it. I live on a hill overlooking a small town. I work in that small town. In the winter, I can see my place of employment from my house. I found that even though the DVAP only puts out 10mw and I have mine set to 75% which would be 7.5 mw; I can use my DVAP around most of the town and I can use it from work anywhere in the building. In other words, the DVAP is sitting on a shelf in my house putting out 7.5 mw and when I am at work with my ID-51A+ HT putting out five watts, I can access my DVAP at home and use it full quieting.

With the DV Mega, I bought the bundle from Giga Parts. This gives you a new Raspberry Pi, the DV Mega board which sits on top of the Pi's GPIO pins, and an SD card with the Maryland D-Star image on it. Add an antenna and a power supply, then take 10 minutes to configure the software and you are on the air. I put this set-up in the Hardened Power System box and use it mobile/portable.  When I am mobile, I use my cell phone as a WIFI hotspot. It uses very little data, even if you talk on it constantly. Using a D-Star hotspot like this IMO is an extremely cool thing to do. Around here, there isn't much activity on the local analog FM repeaters. And there are no local D-Star repeaters. But, with the D-Star hotspot, you always have someone to talk to, no matter where you are (assuming you have a cellular data signal). And you never go out of range of a repeater. If you go on a trip, you can talk to your buddies from your HT no matter where you are.

When it comes to all these various digital voice modes on VHF/UHF, I really don't get the idea of owning radios for all of them. But, it seems like a hellava lot of people do. I hear people all the time on D-Star mentioning that they are also on DMR and Fusion. I decided to just pick one of them and go with it. And for me, this was a no-brainer. D-Star has been around for about 10 years now. It was developed for ham radio use (not public service). There are all kinds of aftermarket devices, software, webpages................ and there are more people on D-Star. One thing that I thought was especially cool about D-Star is that all the stuff that makes it cool was developed by hams. Icom makes the radios, but everything else is aftermarket. And most of that stuff is made by small businesses run by one or a couple guys. It is truly the ham radio spirit in action.

I own a DV Mini also. I haven't gotten real deep into it yet, but it works. However, I believe it has one big disadvantage compared to the DVMega or the DVAP and this is (again, I am no expert and may be wrong) but in order to change reflectors, you do this on the computer and not the radio. In other words, with the DVAP, I can sit in my Lazy Boy and go to any reflector I want by selecting it on the radio. I can also use ircDDB and change reflectors using my cell phone or tablet. But as far as I can tell, with the DV Mini, you need to change reflectors from the computer. I have never tried the DV Mini with Fusion, DMR, P25...... because I don't have radios to try it with. I am going to give it a try probably this week with a buddy of mine that owns a Fusion radio. I do own a P25 radio, but it is on 2 meters and the DV Mini is on 440, so I can't use it with the DV Mini. Again, I don't know a whole lot about the DV Mini, so take anything I say about it with a grain of salt. I wasn't able to find out a whole lot about it on-line. A lot of the stuff you find about it are in German.

maybe I shoulda skipped the CS700 last month....and then there was the Chainsaw I actually needed...lay-away, that's what we need moar of!  

Thanks 444, I should'a put my $ where George and Jeremy told me to and jumped to DStar

I should have told you this before, but I got into D-Star because of the FO Time podcast, D-Star show.
In December, I was taking a vacation out to the south west US. And as I made the three day drive, I was listening to FO Time. I was following a route on my GPS and I had specified that I didn't want to go on any toll roads: so I was out in the middle of no-where going through every small town along the way.  I was listening to the D-Star show as I was driving across the middle of no-where Kansas and it occurred to me that if I had D-Star, I could be on a reflector talking all over the world from a place like this. And I could have been in constant ham radio communication the entire time from when I left home.
When I got to Las Vegas, the second day I was there, I went to AES and bought an Icom ID-51A+ and the rest is history.

And it is all your fault.

Seriously if you are running a pi and a dvmega or dongle look into the dstarcommander pi builds. It has all the bells and whistles built in with rf shutdown and reboot. It can run headless after you burn the image and run the setup software from your computer before powering up the pi.

that's a pretty cool story.  need to look into this d-star thing, perhaps.

 
I have crappy repeater access at/near my home, so the hotspot idea is very valid for me. The 31 isn't a good fit though, as most of my existing repeater usage is 2m analog. Now, if I can find a 440 side for those 2m systems...