Omaha Digital Communications Group

As mentioned earlier this month, we added another D-Star radio to the family following a coworker’s tip that Gigaparts was running a good sale on the Icom gear. The Icom ID-800H D-Star ready radio showed up just in time for our family vacation to central Ohio. I thought I’d share some initial impressions of the radio:

• Physical Package: The radio comes across as being solidly built, and reminds me much of my IC-V8000 except with a removable faceplate. Of course, the D-Star radio traces its actual lineage to the IC-208D which is pretty apparent from the visual similarities. I ordered the mobile mounting kit, which included the MB-65 mounting base and the MB-58 mounting bracket. Icom’s mounting and cable accessories are one area where you clearly feel like you’re being robbed, as $45 for two small pieces of steel and some velcro stickers is outright highway robbery. If it wasn’t for having nearly no good location in my truck to place the radio other than a detached head mount, I would have saved the $100 and stashed it someplace.

• Analog Operation: The radio does really well, with clear booming audio that’s a little bit sharper than the somewhat muffled audio from my Kenwood TM-D700. The mic included is the deluxe one with the keypad, so learning how to program and use the radio using the mic was pretty straight forward (some would say, not in the D-Star tradition of complicated, sometimes maddening documentation usually found in gateway and repeater documents).
• Digital Operation: I found the radio to be much easier to program than the ID-92AD handheld. Setting up MYCALL, URCALL, RPT1C and RPT2C to get you communicating with a D-Star repeater was rather easy (incidentally, for Omaha D-Star operation on the KD0CGR-C 145.175- repeater, you want: MYCALL=your callsign, URCALL=CQCQCQ, RPT1C=KD0CGR C (the space is important), and RPT2C=KD0CGR G )
• Mounting Ease: The mounting kit, as expensive as it was, did provide for a very clean setup. I have the detached head on the dash, with the rig under the driver’s seat. That saved me another $50 on a microphone extension cord (another unjustifiably expensive accessory). I considered placing the rig behind the passenger back seat in the truck, but for this crew cab, it would have required yet another expensive cable to extend the reach of the detached head, and another $75. I was pleased to get the antenna in through the back of the cab, along with my 10 gauge DC wire. The best part of the installation was putting a small PowerPole RigRunner 4005, permitting the DC run to be shared with other devices if needed.

The best part about the ID-800H was its relative affordability compared to the other mobile options, such as the IC-2820H which requires an extra UT-123 D-Star module to work in the digital mode.