#154 - D-Star Is Coming To Hawaii

I am in the process of building a new D-Star UHF repeater which will be installed here at my house and will serve those on the south shore of Oahu from Makakilo to Waikiki.

D-STAR stands for Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio. It is an open standard digital communication protocol established by the Japan Amateur Radio League. It is a digital voice and data protocol specification for amateur radio. The system was developed in the late 1990s by the JARL and uses minimum-shift keying in its packet-based standard. There are other digital modes that have been adapted for use by amateurs, but D-STAR was the first that was designed specifically for amateur radio.

Hawaii has many repeater systems for analog amateur radio and even has several DMR repeaters, but we lack a single working repeater for D-Star users to have access to. It is time to put an end to that and have D-Star available to the amateur radio operators that live on Oahu as well as the many tourists who visit Oahu every year.

Several websites list D-Star repeaters on Oahu, yet those websites were never updated to show that those repeaters were actually never put into operation. There is not a single D-Star repeater on the whole island as many tourist find out as they drive around the island trying to access the repeaters listed.

The repeater that I am building already has an assigned frequency pair, and hopefully will be online within the next couple weeks. The input frequency of the repeater will be 449.7000MHz and the output from the repeater will be on 444.7000MHz.

The repeater will have access to the D-Star gateways, but in the event of a grid-down situation, it will also remain online as a local DMR repeater during emergencies by having it powered by a battery bank and solar panels to recharge the batteries.

I am also working on getting a Starlink satellite internet connection set up on it so that even in a grid-down situation where normal internet, phones, and electricity are out, this repeater will still have access to the worldwide D-Star gateways through the Starlink system from Elon Musk.