Before you learn what a talkgroup is, you need to know where to point the radio. The answer is shorter than you’d expect — and the reason behind it has almost nothing to do with radio.
2 meters and 70 centimeters. That’s it. Buy a dual‑band digital radio and a hotspot and you are equipped for essentially all of amateur digital voice. You can stop reading here and miss nothing you need.
Everything below is a footnote — interesting, occasionally useful, but not where the activity is.
| Band | Where (US) | Digital voice reality |
|---|---|---|
| 10 m | 29.0–29.7 MHz | Essentially none. No ecosystem, no radios, no repeaters. |
| 6 m | 50–54 MHz | Rare. A handful of repeaters exist. Tradition here is SSB and analog. |
| 2 m | 144–148 MHz | Major. D‑STAR, DMR and Fusion repeaters in quantity. |
| 1.25 m | 222–225 MHz | Thin. Radio selection is the limit, not the rules. |
| 70 cm | 420–450 MHz | Dominant. Most repeaters, nearly all hotspots, all six modes. |
| 33 cm | 902–928 MHz | Niche but real. Surplus commercial gear makes DMR viable. |
| 23 cm | 1240–1300 MHz | D‑STAR’s home for voice and for DD, its high‑speed data mode. |
| 13 cm & up | 2.3 GHz and above | Effectively nothing for voice. |
Frequencies shown are the US allocations. ITU Region 1 and Region 3 differ, most noticeably at 70 cm — check your own band plan.
Here is the part nobody tells you: 70 cm did not win on technical merit. It won because of where somebody else’s business happened to be.
The commercial land‑mobile world — taxi fleets, utilities, warehouses, public safety — lives at 400–470 MHz. That is where Motorola, Hytera, Kenwood and Icom built their products, by the million. So that is where the cheap radios are, the cheap repeaters, the cheap duplexers, and the surplus.
DMR is not a ham invention. It is an ETSI commercial standard that hams adopted, running on hardware that was already rolling off the line for somebody else. The same story runs at 136–174 MHz, which is why 2 m is the strong second.
You have met this argument before on this site. The vocoder row of the Rosetta Stone says a patent shaped the hobby. This page says a market did. Amateur digital voice looks the way it looks because of decisions made by companies serving customers who were never hams at all.
This one is physics. A digital voice signal needs roughly 6.25 to 12.5 kHz of channel. An HF SSB channel gives you about 2.8 kHz. The room is not there — and the HF bands are far too crowded to hand any mode four times the space it has now.
There is a second reason, and it matters more than the first: the modes on this site are networked modes. They assume a repeater, a hotspot, an internet link. That whole architecture is a VHF/UHF architecture. It has nothing to offer a band whose entire appeal is that the ionosphere carries you without any infrastructure at all.
33 cm (902–928 MHz) is the sleeper. The band is shared with unlicensed devices and it is noisy, but surplus commercial DMR gear turns up cheaply and a small, determined community runs repeaters there. If you like a band nobody else is on, this is it.
23 cm (1240–1300 MHz) is D‑STAR’s quiet home. It is the only place you will find DD — Icom’s 128 kbit/s digital data mode, which is not voice at all but rides in the same protocol family. Coverage is short and equipment is scarce. It is a band for people who enjoy the difficulty.
1.25 m (222–225 MHz) deserves better than it gets. The propagation is genuinely good and the band is uncrowded. What kills it is supply: almost nobody manufactures a digital radio for it — which is the same market logic that made 70 cm king, running in reverse.
Look before you leap. Repeater directories will show you what is on the air within range of you, by mode and by band. That five‑minute lookup is worth more than any comparison chart — including the ones on this site.
Two bands carry amateur digital voice: 2 m and 70 cm, with 70 cm well in front. Everything else is a curiosity or a challenge.
And the reason is not that engineers chose those bands. It is that a global commercial radio industry was already building there, and the hobby went where the hardware was. Digital voice did not pick its home — it moved in where the rent was cheap.