What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? Digital Voice in Amateur Radio is broken. It's a big call for a mere F-call to make, so let me back that up with some facts. There are three basic digital voice products you can buy as an amateur today, D-Star made by ICOM, System Fusion made by Yaesu and MOTOTRBO or TRBO by Motorola. There is also Project 25, or P25. Each of these systems are based around technologies and patents owned by a company called Digital Voice Systems Inc. or DVSI. In essence, each of these systems use the same maths to encode and decode an audio signal. This process of encoding and decoding is embodied in a thing called a Coder / Decoder or CODEC. While each of these use the same maths, owned by the same company, they don't actually inter-operate. What that means that if you want to use a D-Star repeater, you need a D-Star radio, and if you want to use a System Fusion repeater, you need a System Fusion radio, even though both radios use the same maths to make your voice into a digital signal. It gets wo