a community reference for hams running D-STAR digital voice in Utah: repeaters, nets, reflectors, and what you need to get on the air.
D-STAR (Digital Smart Technology for Amateur Radio) is an open digital voice and data protocol developed by the Japan Amateur Radio League (JARL) and widely implemented on Icom radios. Voice is encoded with the AMBE codec at 3600 bps with 1200 bps of FEC. Repeaters can be linked together over the internet through gateways and reflectors, so a contact made on a local Utah repeater can reach a station almost anywhere D-STAR is active.
Around two dozen D-STAR repeaters are listed across Utah (Salt Lake, Cache, Tooele, Box Elder, Sanpete, Sevier, Utah, Weber, and Washington counties) on 2 m, 70 cm, and 23 cm. Most carry voice; a few also carry 23 cm digital data (DD). In practice only a handful show recent on-air activity: last-heard data confirms regular traffic on NU7TS (Wellsville), K7BSK (central Utah), and N7RDS (Box Elder). Much of the day-to-day conversation now flows through REF029 and the multi-mode bridge rather than any single RF repeater.
Featured Utah systems with full module detail, plus the complete RepeaterBook status table.
Register your callsign for gateway access, program your radio, and link to a reflector.
NUTS D-STAR Net: Sunday 20:00 Mountain on Reflector 029 C, the persistent Utah reflector.
REF, XRF, DCS: what they are, and the URCALL commands to link and unlink.
How REF029 ties D-STAR to DMR, Fusion, P25, NXDN, M17, and AllStar on shared modules.
Utah VHF Society, RepeaterBook, ARRL, D-STAR Info, and other authoritative sources.
Honestly, native D-STAR activity in Utah is minimal. Only a few repeaters (NU7TS, K7BSK, N7RDS) show regular RF traffic, and you can sit on a D-STAR repeater for a long time without hearing another D-STAR user. What makes it worth running is the REF029 multi-mode bridge: it ties D-STAR into DMR, Fusion, P25, NXDN, M17, and AllStar, and DMR in particular has a much larger Utah user base. So when you key up on a D-STAR repeater or hotspot linked to REF029, you are bridged into the Utah Digital Repeater Network; most of the voices you hear are coming in over DMR and the other bridged modes, not D-STAR RF. For an Icom owner it's the easiest on-ramp to all that shared traffic, and the NUTS Sunday net keeps a regular schedule.