At the time I bought this radio I was a complete noob, newly licensed and no practical experience. I wanted to buy into the D-star ecosystem for various reasons. Firstly because I knew I was unable to put up antenna's in my rental house, secondly because my dad in Australia had a D-star radio and had spoken about using the system for world wide communications.
So I bought the radio off amazon and got it the same day :) I head about things like bluetooth modules and cables to use terminal and AP mode, so I ordered them as well.
First impressions
This radio has a really small display, It seemed somewhat intuitive to use, the menu navigations just kind of made sense.
I put the radio in the car with a glass mount 2m/70cm antenna and it seemed to work the way I expected.
Then came d-star, which I will cover in a separate blog post.
What I will say about the bluetooth module, and cable for AP/Terminal mode is don't bother, I bought these not really knowing what they did, so here is the summary.
The bluetooth module allows you to use a companion app on your phone for various things, I found (and have with all things bluetooth) the connection was flakey and results were lukewarm. I quickly reverted to using the menus on the radio for operation rather than the app...I mean the radio is in the car and looking at the phone screen wasn't all that safe. Here is a tip for Icom if they want this to be useful work with Google and Apple to get their app integrated into Android Auto and Car play.
As for AP/ Terminal mode, this didn't really function the way I had wanted it to. I really wanted this to enable me to talk directly to repeaters without consuming air time on a local repeater, as I always kind of feel guilty about this.
This is kind of what it is but not quite, so for the sake of this I will focus on Terminal mode. What I imagined was that the radio would use the data on my phone to connect to repeaters, was not quite right, I could use the data on my phone to connect to reflectors but I didn't know this at the time.
I quickly lost interest in this for a couple of reasons. Firstly there is so much conflicting information and I ended up mucking around with TCP/UDP port forwarding more than anything else, the actual ports required seemed to be different on almost every web page.
Second I managed to score a cheap DVAP and this was a much better option that worked a lot more robustly than the flakey software and information around the Icom suggested methods.
As this radio was capturing my interest I found that more and more I was bringing the radio inside, and eventually built one of these antennas
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:42yn1TZIFuIJ:kv5r.com/ham-radio/simple-2-meter-antenna/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
I was able to have this up outside in an umbrella stand and as such didn't really need to put an antenna up.
This turned out to be a disaster and in the end I bought a copper J-pole off ebay which gave me remarkably improved coverage from my house.
This radio now has a permanent home in my truck, and I use it with pi-star based d-star hotspot and my cars wifi to talk to people (including my Dad) all over the world.
I would probably buy this radio again it has done well, a larger screen would be nice, and also some backlit text on the function buttons under the screen would be very useful.
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