A few days ago I bought a DV-Dongle, a device which plugs into your USB port (Mac or PC) and allows you to connect over the internet to the D-Star network via D-Star gateways. Once connected, you can have a D-Star digital voice conversation without a radio. I thought it would be particularly useful when I’m on the road and outside the coverage area of a D-Star repeater.

I bought the DV-Dongle from Ham Radio Outlet here in Denver, and it’s not just plug and play.

Firstly, for Mac users, you have to download some virtual com port drivers from this site, and then restart.

Next, download the tarball here, which installs the software (mostly Java).

Now it installs into a folder called “DVTool”, and when I tried to start DVTool.jar, it looked like it worked, but it didn’t. There was some error complaining about “can’t find ascpserialdimac”. So I tried starting from the command line, using dvtool.sh and everything worked.

Just in time for me to get into the Thursday evening W6DHS D-Star net.