Your callsign is your ID — but you still have to register it, and almost everyone stops halfway.
DMR gives you a seven-digit number. NXDN gives you a five-digit one. D-STAR gives you nothing at all — because your callsign is the identifier. There is no number to look up, no registry of integers, no risk of a duplicate. You put N6JET in the radio, and N6JET is what goes out over the air and appears on everyone else’s display.
This is the most elegant identity scheme of any digital voice mode. It is also, ironically, wrapped in the most confusing registration process of the lot — one that is famous for leaving newcomers half-registered, convinced they are done, and wondering why the reflectors will not talk to them.
You can key up a local D-STAR repeater without registering. The repeater will repeat you and local stations will hear you. What you cannot do is use the gateway — which is to say, everything that makes D-STAR interesting.
Registration is what unlocks:
Without registration you have a very expensive local FM repeater that happens to be digital.
Do not register at more than one gateway. A single registration on any gateway works worldwide, forever, on every gateway in the network. Registering a second time somewhere else does not give you anything extra — it creates a duplicate that breaks things, and administrators will refuse it.
Your registration is not tied to your local repeater. Move house, move states, move countries — it still works. The only reason to move a registration is if the gateway you registered on goes dark and leaves you orphaned, and even then the correct procedure is to have the old one deleted first.
If you have ever dabbled in D-STAR, you may have registered years ago and forgotten. Before doing anything else, look yourself up:
If you come up registered and you have a terminal, you are done. Put your callsign in the radio and go.
This is where people come unstuck, so read the next sentence twice.
Registration is TWO steps, and the first one alone does nothing. Getting your request approved is not the finish line. If you stop there — as a great many people do — you are not registered, the gateway will not pass your traffic, and nothing will tell you why.
Go to a gateway’s registration page. If you have no local gateway, the volunteer-run regist.dstargateway.org exists precisely for this.
Now wait. A volunteer administrator will verify your licence is valid and that you are not already registered elsewhere. This usually takes a day or two. You will get an email when it is approved.
Once approved, go back and log in again. You are not finished yet.
That is it. You are now registered.
The space is invisible, and that is normal. Once you click away, the Initial box will look empty again. It is not — the space is in there. This single detail generates more confused forum posts than anything else in D-STAR. If you are unsure, tick the delete box for line 1, update, and redo it.
Allow an hour or so for the change to propagate across the global registration servers. Then check yourself at dstar.info/query.html to confirm.
The eight lines in that table let you register up to eight terminals — distinct endpoints under your callsign, each identified by a single character in the Initial field.
For almost everyone, one terminal with a space is all you will ever need, no matter how many D-STAR radios you own. Put the same plain callsign in MYCALL on all of them.
You need extra terminals only in two situations:
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Icom ID-1 on 1.2 GHz in DD (Digital Data) mode | Add a terminal with a letter |
| Icom Terminal / AccessPoint mode (ID-51A Plus2, ID-4100A) | Add a letter terminal and tick AccessPoint |
If you do use a letter instead of a space, you may pick any capital letter except G — G is reserved and means “gateway.” And be aware of the cost: you must then enter your callsign plus that letter in the MYCALL field of every radio using it. The space is simpler. Use the space.
Registration is worthless until the radio is set. The essential field:
MYCALL (sometimes just MY) — set this to your registered callsign, exactly as registered. Nothing else works until this is right.
The other callsign fields, in brief:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| MYCALL | You. Your registered callsign. |
| UR | Who or what you are calling — CQCQCQ for a general call, or a command like REF001CL. |
| RPT1 | The repeater you are hitting, plus its module letter. |
| RPT2 | The gateway — the repeater callsign with G in the 8th position. This is the field that routes you out to the world. |
Note that G in RPT2. That is why G is forbidden as a terminal letter — the network reserves it to mean “send this to the gateway.”
If you are running a hotspot with Pi-Star or WPSD rather than using a repeater, you still need to be registered to reach the gateway-based reflectors (the REF network in particular). The registration is the same one — it is attached to your callsign, not to any piece of hardware.
Note that some of the newer reflector systems — XLX and XRF in particular — are more forgiving than the classic Icom G2 gateway network, and you may find yourself getting through to some of them without a completed registration. Do not rely on it. Register properly and the whole network opens up.
It is easy to grumble about D-STAR’s registration — the two steps, the invisible space, the volunteer approval queue. But consider what it buys.
NXDN squeezes the entire world into 65,519 numbers, and duplicates are so common that operators are asked to transmit a callsign alias just to sort out who is who. DMR hands you a seven-digit number that means nothing to anyone and must be looked up in a database that has to be loaded into your radio. D-STAR simply sends your callsign. It is human-readable, globally unique by definition, issued by your own government, and impossible to confuse with anyone else’s.
Icom got the identity right on the first try, in 2001, and then wrapped it in a registration process designed by engineers. Sit through the twenty minutes. It is worth it.