Over the last couple of days I've been experimenting with the digital voice setup that I use at home.

Digital Voice technologies have been being explored by radio amateurs since the early 2000s following the introduction of DSTAR from ICOM and System Fusion from Yaesu on equipment specifically for amateur radio use, along with repurposed Digital Mobile Radio, NXDN, and P25 equipment originally designed and sold for the commercial two-way radio market.

While each of these have their own characteristics they share the same aim of making efficient use of radio spectrum while providing high quality audio along with data features such as location reporting and text messaging.

Many parts of the UK are well served by digital repeaters, and I am fortunate to have two within workable range, GB7FE on 70cm and GB7LV on 2m. Both of these are multi-mode with support for DMR, DSTAR and System Fusion. As a new user the learning curve, particularly for DMR, can be a little steep so being able to use existing infrastructure and obtain assistance from other amateurs is helpful.

My first experiences were on DMR using a relatively inexpensive TYT MD-390 handheld, a ruggedized version of the popular MD-380.

More recently, an upgrade of my main shack radio to a Yaseu FT-991a has brought me System Fusion capability.

In addition to the local repeaters, I also have a Raspberry Pi based device with a digital voice modem that acts as a 'hotspot' - a low-powered gateway to various digital voice networks.

For experimentation the hotspot is useful as it gives the amateur total control of what is going on, and visibility into both the RF and network sides of the system.

Up until now I've been using the Pi-Star linux distribution on my hotspot. Pi-Star is a great tool that works almost out of the box with an easy to use web front end, supports

As I wanted to learn more about how the underlying system works and explore some features not yet presented to the user by Pi-Star, I've been working on my own hotspot setup based on the Raspberry Pi OS Lite distribution and the same application software that Pi-Star uses. I'll write a separate post on how I went about that and how I got on.