> So am I right in my understanding that a DStar 2m radio (such as
> IC-V82 + UT-118) will send (or can be made to send) unadulterated
> data over the voice+data channel?

Yes*.

The footnote being that you can't send any byte sequence.  Since the
radios use XON/XOFF flow control, those values are obviously out.
Some of the radios use the data port for programming as well, so there
are some escape sequences that you can't send.  D-RATS uses yenc-style
escaping to only avoid the specific banned values without having to
encode the rest.

> Does this mean whatever it receives on the serial port is sent out
> as additional data on voice+data more, or is there a comms protocol
> on the ICOMs to 'poke' data bytes into a message queue?

Correct, what you put in comes out the other end (assuming the note
above).  There is no protocol you need to speak to the radio.

> Q. How useful/important would it be for transmission integrity to
> include compression/FEC of 'simple data' on the voice+data link.

D-RATS does compression and error detection.  At 900 baud, FEC starts
to eat up your channel pretty quick.  For most connections, framing
and checksums provide a good balance of speed and overhead.

-- 
Dan Smith
dsmith#danplanet.com, s/#/@/
www.danplanet.com
KK7DS

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