New to D-Star   in VK/AU – questions

I posted these to the VK D-Star Facebook group. I’ll post the responses I get.

Hi everyone, I live in country NSW (Bellingen) and have a 52A+. I recently got an MMDVM hotspot and am now in the D-Star universe. I can see myself having a lot of fun. I’ve already been on one or two nets.   I am after some feedback on the following, please:  

Nets 1: I have been on the Darwin net but found the GC net was not happening as no one else was there. A nice person came on and said there hasn’t been one for years. (https://www.dstar.org.au/about/nets/ ) What VK nets are there?  

Nets 2: Are there any worthwhile international nets?  Reflectors 1: I’ve been on REF023C and REF091C and heard some traffic, but not a lot. I jumped on DCS014 / XLX014 but heard nothing (http://xreflector.net ). Where is there chat in Australia? Are there other reflectors? Advice welcome. Are there pages with info on these sites/reflectors apart from the list of users who are on them?  

Reflectors 2: What’s the difference between, for example, REF023 A, B and C? Is C the best one? Oh, and for others, this is a good explanation of reflector-palooza. (https://www.f4fxl.org/ref-xrf-dcs-xlx-whats-the-difference/ )  

Reflectors 3: There appears to be only one VK DCS reflector (014) (based on http://xreflector.net ). Is this right? I thought I saw a list with more. Is DSC014 the main VK one?  

Reflectors 4. Then there’s XLX reflectors (https://xlxlef-dash.gb7hh.co.uk/index.php? ). In VK: 006, 014, 087, 301, 432, 500, 505, 751, 820, 824, 903, 940, EMB. Are any of these worth dropping in on?  

Hotspot: So I got one hot spot to leave at home and that works fine. I got another one for the car, POTA and other remote uses that runs off a 4G hotspot. Do I just clone the home one to the mobile one, or do I have to configure them differently? If I use the mobile one, do I have to turn the home one off when I leave? They’re on different networks. The 4G hotspot has the same SSID as my home network, but (of course) a different IP address.  

I know there’s a lot here but I will do up the responses into a blog post.   

Thanks,   Andrew, VK2AWN.   

14 September 2025

Responses from the Australian D-Star Facebook Group