Category: Digital Modes (Inc: FT8, DMR, YSF, DStar, Etc)

  • Two Cheap Ways to Get Into DMR

    Part of our Getting On The Air: Modes, Operations, and Making Contacts guide. DMR is one of the cheapest digital modes to actually get on the air with, and you don’t need a nearby repeater to do it. There are two realistic paths in: buy a little hardware, or skip the hardware entirely and run…

  • 2001: D-STAR Published, the First Ham-Specific Digital Voice Mode

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Every digital voice mode I operate today, D-STAR on my FTX-1, DMR on my AnyTone, all traces back to a research project the Japanese government funded in the late 1990s. The result was D-STAR, and it holds a distinction none of the other digital voice…

  • ~2010: DMR Crosses Over From Commercial Radio to Ham Radio

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Unlike D-STAR, DMR wasn’t built for amateur radio at all. It started life as a commercial land mobile radio standard, and hams basically invited themselves to the party once cheap DMR radios started flooding the market. There’s no single clean founding date the way there…

  • 2013: Yaesu System Fusion (YSF) Brings C4FM to Ham Radio

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. By 2013, hams had two digital voice options: Icom’s purpose-built D-STAR, and the commercial DMR standard amateurs had adopted for its cheap hardware. Yaesu decided the market needed a third option, one built entirely in-house, and released System Fusion, commonly known as YSF. Yaesu builds…

  • 2017: FT8 Released and Changed Weak-Signal HF Forever

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. Nothing else on this timeline changed how I personally operate HF as much as FT8 did. Released in 2017, it went from a brand new mode to the dominant form of digital HF activity in under two years, and it’s the reason my IC-7300 Mark…

  • Today: Where Amateur Radio Stands Now, HF, Digital, and Everything Between

    Part of our The Evolution of Amateur Radio timeline series. This is the last stop on the timeline, and it’s the only one without a fixed date, because it’s still being written. Amateur radio today is a genuine mashup of every era covered in this series: century-old HF DXing, postwar VHF repeaters, personal radio services…

  • Pat Winlink Client: Setup and Your First Message

    Winlink Express is the client most hams default to, but it’s Windows-only, which leaves Mac and Linux users, along with anyone running Winlink from a Raspberry Pi, looking for an alternative. Pat fills that gap: a free, open-source, cross-platform Winlink client that runs pretty much anywhere. Why Pat exists Pat was built to give non-Windows…

  • Setting Up WIRES-X on the FTX-1: Registration, Software, and Getting Connected

    Getting the FTX-1 onto WIRES-X, from radio ID registration through the PC software’s confusing COM port setup, laid out start to finish.

  • Setting Up APRS on the AnyTone AT-D578UV III Plus

    The 578 shares its APRS architecture with the 878, which makes sense since AnyTone builds the CPS around the same feature set across the mobile and handheld lines. The setup steps are nearly identical, but a mobile radio adds a couple of wrinkles worth calling out, starting with the GPS antenna itself. Mount the GPS…

  • Troubleshooting Common FTX-1 Digital Mode Audio Issues

    The digital mode audio problems that come up most with the FTX-1, and the order I actually check things in to fix them fast.

  • GridTracker and the FTX-1: Logging FT8 Contacts Automatically

    How I connect GridTracker to the FTX-1 through WSJT-X so FT8 contacts get logged, mapped, and routed to QSL services without manual entry.

  • Olivia and MFSK: Robust Digital Text Modes Beyond FT8

    FT8 gets all the attention these days, but it’s not actually the most robust digital text mode available to you. Olivia and MFSK were built for a different problem: pulling a readable message out of conditions bad enough to wipe out almost anything else, at the cost of being considerably slower. How Olivia gets its…

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