I play with DStar and have played with it in a number of environments. I think that DStar is awesome, but we (the hams) really need to pry ICOM's icy grip off of it. The system is awesome, but the fact that no other manufacturers will play in this game is bad. I am not much of a dongle supporter because we are "radio" amateurs, not "internet" amateurs. The internet is a great thing, but we should not become dependent on it, and that is what the dongle does. We need to figure out how to set up an RF network that will support routing of the DStar transmissions and move away from the internet. Again, that would require us to pry ICOM's icy grip off DStar. I am not sure how to do that. I will leave that up to people much smarter than me. 73 David, AC7DS
