Today I was checking out the New York City's metropolitan area repeater frequencies when I noticed that a few D-STAR repeaters are already active.
Since I never really spent a single minute to find out what this new mode was all about I decided it was time to learn something new and eventually buy a new D-STAR radio.

According to Wikipedia, D-STAR is "a digital voice and data protocol specification developed as the result of research by the Japan Amateur Radio League to investigate digital technologies for amateur radio. While there are other digital on-air technologies being used by amateurs that have come from other services, D-Star is one of the first on-air standards to be widely deployed and sold by a major radio manufacturer that is designed specifically for amateur service use"

It looked interesting already but when I found that Miles Mann WF1F is proposing the adoption of the D-STAR based ICOM ID800 onboard the ISS I was almost convinced that it was time for me to buy one of these.
Unfortunately, my enthusiasm cooled down when I read about some of the criticism that is raising around it.

In facts, always on Wikipedia, you can read: "D-STAR has been criticized for its use of a patented, closed-source proprietary voice codec (AMBE). Hams do not have access to the detailed specification of this codec or the rights to implement it on their own without buying a licensed product. Hams have a long tradition of building, improving upon and experimenting with their own radio designs. The modern digital age equivalent of this would be designing and/or implementing codecs in software. Critics say the proprietary nature of AMBE and its availability only in hardware form (as ICs) discourages innovation. Even critics praise the openness of the rest of the D-STAR standard which can be implemented freely."

In other words Amateur Radio operators will only be able to use D-STAR without having the possibility of fully understanding how it works.
I suggest you to read the Bruce Perens K6BP proposal. After reading it you will realize that the technical and legal implications of D-STAR are really scary for the Amateur Radio world and for AMSAT in particular. So scary that Rick Hambly, AMSAT's president, asked Bruce Perens to continue to work on this problem after hearing his keynote speech at the TAPR/ARRL Digital Communications Conference.

If you are familiar with this site you probably already have read about the issfanclub.com campaign to renew the ISS station.
The objections I hear the most are based upon the lack of funds, the lack of launch opportunities, the lack of interest from the crew (they have a telephone now!), the cost of the ground equipment.

Now, the fact that somebody else is actually proposing an upgrade demonstrates in the first place that an upgrade is really necessary, and in the second place that all the other objections are not valid because the solution I propose requires no hardware (besides a PC!), opens new capabilites for the crew and costs virtually nothing to the ground stations.
If the other gets approved, mine could get approved too.

Who is going to afford the expensive process (tens of thousands of dollars) necessary to send a new radio to space? Definitely not AMSAT nor ARISS. My guess is that the bill will be paid by the very same companies that produce and sell D-STAR. There is nothing wrong with that (it's actually good that some companies still care about amateur radio), but what is the price that we as a community are going to pay in return?

I am not referring to the price of the AMBE boards that we will be forced to buy in order to communicate with the ISS. I refer to a bigger one: the price of freedom.
Do we really want to trade our basic freedom to use, understand and improve our technology for a new transceiver?
I believe we don't, and that is why issfanclub.com will be against D-STAR onboard the ISS until it will eventually become a fully open standard for the Amateur Radio community.