Lots of excitement about D-STAR, that’s what happened at Dayton.

It started on Thursday evening at Marion’s Pizza with the Dayton Amateur Radio Club sponsoring a D-STAR gathering. There were a lot of people putting faces to call signs that we talked to on a regular basis.

On Friday morning, we started with the DSTAR InfoCon. 3 hours of D-STAR training for those new to D-STAR led by John WB4QDX. While John held class, Ed WA4YIH opened the DSTARInfo / Georgia D-STAR booth. As the doors opened, throngs of people swarmed the building and the D-STAR booths got busy. Aside from the Icom booth in the main hall, Icom’s D-STAR booth was manned by the Trust Server Team and Dan Smith of D-RATS fame. Georgia D-STAR presented the D-STAR Info booth with a number of helpers throughout the weekend, including Jim Moen of Star*Board fame.

Next door we had the Internet Labs booth with the DVDongle and DVAP.

New to Dayton was Newfield Design and their ProHam D-STAR repeater controller and Northwest Digital Radio with their UDR56K4 radio. Both of these groups exhibited their products. They are quite interesting and will help D-STAR to the next level.

The main D-STAR forum on Friday filled the largest forum room and a  number of great presentations, including my own “No More Programming” presentation that shows you how easy it is to program your radio with information from DSTARInfo, and then talks about the ID-31A that comes preprogrammed from the factory!!!!

On Thursday evening, as had D-STAR Across America with a full room of D-STAR lunatics, whoops, I meant enthusiasts. Ray Novak, Icom America’s General Manager gave a presentation on the history of D-STAR, the reason why many of the choices were made during the design process.

Ken Atkisson talked about DPlusMon and DPlusReport, two tools that are invaluable to repeater administrators and net controls. David Lake gave an update on his project and along with the US Trust Server Team, showed off a prototype repeater. Not too amazing, unless you saw it. A full D-STAR repeater, including the gateway computer in a form factor that would fit inside a shoe box! We also heard from a number of other speakers throughout the evening.

Now many of you may have heard the Yaesu was supposed to show a new digital radio at Dayton, and they did, the FT-1D. There wasn’t much fanfare behind it, and there’s still a lot of speculation about it. What reliable sources have determined is that it is a Tier 1 DMR radio. Tier 1 DMR radios are relatively new and not sold in the US. The Tier 1 DMR radio is currently being sold in Europe as a non-licensed device, similar to the FCC FRS service. An interesting aspect is that the speaker – mic has a camera embedded in it, to allow users to send pictures. Not much else is known about the radio.

The one thing that was the most obvious is that there is a continued, even renewed source of enthusiasm in D-STAR. The UDR56K4 is a new paradigm in radio. AA4RC teased us with some new items coming down the road. One of the most exciting was that there were a lot of areas, previously not covered by D-STAR that have just become or soon will be covered. There was a lot of chatter about additional things in the pipeline. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes discussions going on, some hopefully leading to better collaboration behind many of the developers of D-STAR.

And to top it off, we found out the ID-31A sold out rather early in the weekend, evidently people are really liking the “No programming” concept of the new radio which comes from the factory preloaded with the worldwide D-STAR repeaters.

So don’t wait until it’s too late, go ahead and start making your plans for next year, it’s going to be exciting!

Ed WA4YIH

D-STAR Day will be held at the Radisson Park Inn Sharon hotel in West Middlesex, PA., on Saturday January 28th, 2012. Starting at 9 AM and finishing at 4 PM.

We believe about 100 hams will attend from the local area including Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Akron/Canton, Cleveland and Erie. D-STAR Day will include presentations from Icom and other D-STAR experts. If you want to learn more about D-STAR, this is your chance.

ICOM America is excited to attend D-STAR Day. Presenting will be ICOM Division Manager - Amateur and Receiver Products - Ray Novak, N9JA. Staff from DX Engineering and Superbertha.com will be in attendance as well!

In addition to Ray Novak, N9JA – here are some of the other attendees to D-STAR Day:

• Founder of the Georgia Statewide D Star network and D-Rats expert – John Davis, WB4QDX
• The inventor of the DV Dongle – Robin Cutshaw, AA4RC
• ARRL Atlantic Division Director Bill Edgar, N3LLR
• ARRL Western Pennsylvania Section Manager – John Rodgers, N3MSE

There will also be a “field trip” for all participants to nearby (1 mile away) Amateur Radio station K3LR

For more information http://www.dstarday.com/

Georiga D-STAR had a table at the event and a number of folks dropped by to say hello.

And of course the big event was when the D-STAR Santa dropped by.

But Santa (Patrick W4VZB)  walks away with the Grand Prize a Kenwood TS-590!

Take a look at some of the photos at Flickr. There's a number of your D-STAR stars in the show!

Here's the link to HamNation.  You can see Gordon in a D-STAR QSO with Japan, Robin talks about the DVAP at about 36:00.

About 70 folks made it to the DSTARInfoCon even with it being Easter weekend. And about 70 folks staggered away, full of all sorts of new D-STAR information. From the beginners to the advanced, there were classes to be enjoyed by everyone.

First, I'd like to thank the instructors who did this out of the goodness of their heart.

And all of the participants who made the trek. I believe that we had 5 states represented!

3 of our presenters attended without being there. David, Pete, and Mark all were remote presenters, spread across the country and joining us either with D-STAR or Web Meeting.

The following is a list of classes that we had

It was a full day of D-STAR. And we even had giveaways from Icom, RT Systems, and HRO.

D-STAR InfoCon will be held at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia, just 30 minutes northeast of downtown Atlanta. Participants can choose from informative, hands-on classes to get you started for the new D-STAR user to more advanced topics for experienced users.

For More Information see  DSTARInfoCon 2011

This year's presentation were as follows:

• Ed Woodrick WA4YIH - Learning how to program your D-STAR radios
• John Davis WB4QDX - Using D-RATS
• Robin Cutshaw AA4RC - DVDongle, DVAP, and more
• Scott Hartwell - KJ4PWI - Sending high resolution pictures using airborne D-STAR DD mode