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First run: from download to your first contact

This is the short path from a freshly downloaded astar.dmg to hearing a repeater and being heard back. It should take about ten minutes, most of it spent on audio levels.

You must be a licensed amateur

Everything below ends with a real transmitter keying on a real band. An appropriate amateur radio licence for your jurisdiction is required, and as control operator you are responsible for every transmission your station makes — including the ones a computer initiated on your behalf.

astar does not know your licence class, your band and mode privileges, or your local identification rules. Those stay yours. On-air safety is the full version and is not optional reading.

What you need

  • An amateur radio licence, and a callsign you are entitled to use.
  • A Mac running macOS 13 (Ventura) or later, Apple silicon.
  • An AllStarLink account on allstarlink.org with at least one node number assigned to your callsign.
  • A headset — USB or Bluetooth. Not required, but it makes everything below easier, for reasons the Audio section explains.

1. Install

Download astar.dmg from the releases page, open it, and drag astar.app to Applications. The app is signed and notarized, so it opens on a double-click — no right-click-Open dance, no Gatekeeper override.

On first launch astar asks for microphone access. Say yes; without it the mic reads digital silence and you will transmit dead air. If you dismissed the prompt by accident, grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.

Look for the rainbow asterisk in the menu bar. Left-click it to open the client. That popover is the whole app.

Settings opens by itself the first time, because nothing works until this is filled in. If it did not, click the gear in the lower left of the popover.

At the top of the Settings page is the AllStarLink account box. Three fields:

Field What goes in it
Callsign Yours, e.g. N0CALL.
Node number A node number registered to you.
Account password Your allstarlink.org website password.

This is the website password, not the node password

This trips up nearly everyone. astar logs in to the AllStarLink portal to mint a connection token — the same password you type into the website, not the per-node secret out of your node's config. If you have a hardware node (a ClearNode, a Pi running app_rpt), its node password is not what goes here.

Which node number? Any node registered to your callsign. If you already have a hardware node on the air, request a second node number for astar and use that. Two things logging in as the same node will fight over the registration.

Press Test. You want Token minted ✓ — credentials valid. Until that succeeds, the dial field stays locked and Settings will keep telling you that AllStarLink is unavailable — that is the app refusing to let you dial into a failure, not a bug.

If Test fails, it is almost always the password. Log in to allstarlink.org in a browser to confirm it, and check the callsign and node number for typos.

3. Set your audio levels

Levels are where most of the setup time goes. Open Quick settings in the popover.

Pick the devices

Mic and Speaker each default to System Default, which follows whatever macOS is using. That is a fine starting point. Choosing your headset explicitly is better once you have one you like, because then astar keeps using it even if macOS switches the system default out from under you.

Turn voice compression OFF while you set levels

Leave Voice compression off for now.

Compression is an automatic leveller: it pushes quiet audio up and holds loud audio down until everything fits the transmit range. That is useful on the air and confusing on the bench — you turn a knob, and compression quietly undoes it. Set your raw levels first, then turn compression back on if you want it.

Watch the meters, not the numbers

Talk normally into the mic and watch the Audio Level bar.

  • Mic Level sets the input gain. Aim for the bar living in the upper-middle of its range on normal speech, with the loudest peaks short of the top. The default is 90%, deliberately backed off to leave headroom.
  • TX Gain is the final stage after compression — think of it as TX boost. If compression alone will not get you loud enough, this is the control that will. It is also the one to pull down if a hot mic is making you too loud.
  • Vol is astar's own speaker gain, from 100% up to 400%. It only ever boosts; it will not attenuate below unity. Use it when a station comes in weak.

astar never touches your Mac's volume

Every control above is astar's own software gain. astar does not read or change the macOS output volume, the menu-bar slider, or anything in Audio MIDI Setup. If your headset's master volume slider is greyed out in Audio MIDI Setup, that is the headset's own USB descriptor not exposing a master control — normal, harmless, and unrelated to astar. Set levels in astar.

Full duplex — headphones only

Full duplex lets you hear the channel while you are transmitting, which is how you find out that someone is doubling with you.

On a laptop with the built-in speaker and built-in mic, turn it off. The speaker feeds straight back into the mic and you get a feedback loop. Full duplex is a headphones feature.

With headphones on and full duplex enabled, watch for the green RX meter spiking while you are transmitting. That means someone else is talking over you — back off and let them finish.

4. Choose how you key up

astar gives you four ways to transmit. Any of them can be your main one.

  • The TX button in the popover — press and hold.
  • The Spacebar — hold to talk. The astar window has to have keyboard focus; astar deliberately does not grab the Spacebar system-wide. If you are typing in a text field, Space types a space and does not key.
  • VOX — voice-activated. Turn on VOX in Quick settings. Two knobs: VOX threshold (default −40 dB; drag toward −60 for more sensitivity) and Hang Timeout (default 500 ms — how long transmit stays up through the natural gaps between words). Use Test to sample your room's noise floor while you stay quiet; astar will tell you if your threshold sits too close to it and suggest a safer one. A threshold below the noise floor means the room keys your transmitter.
  • A hardware PTT switch on a USB radio interface — see Hardware.

And one way to not transmit: TX disabled — listening only hard-mutes transmit no matter what else is set. It is the right setting for monitoring a net, and it pairs well with VOX while you are still tuning the threshold.

5. Make a contact

Back in the popover, type a node number into the dial field and press Connect. A local repeater or hub node is the usual first target; the AllStarLink node list is where to find one near you.

Nodes you connect to are saved automatically as recents, and you can star one to make it a favorite and give it your own name — "Local 2m", not 51234. Favorites are unlimited; the recents list shows the ten most recent.

Listen first, then key up and identify.

Things worth knowing early

Where your settings live. Preferences — devices, gains, VOX, favorites, saved configs — are in ~/Library/Preferences/com.aj7hr.astar.plist. Your portal password is not in there; it is in the login Keychain under com.aj7hr.astar, which is what you want.

Settings can be exported to a file and imported back, in whole or in part, so a second Mac does not mean re-entering everything — see Saved configs, backup and transfer. Your portal password is never in an export; it stays in the Keychain, so the account is the one thing you enter again. There is still no "put my config on a network drive and sync it" option.

Mic profiles. Analyze… in Quick settings characterizes a microphone — measuring its noise floor and notching out whine and hum — and saves the result as a named profile you can pick per config. Worth doing once for each mic you use regularly.

Configs. A config bundles a device pair, gains, and a mic profile under a name. System Default is the built-in one you start on. Save your headset setup as its own config and switching rigs becomes one menu pick.

Other networks. The network picker appears once astar has more than one network available. M17 needs nothing installed and dials reflectors as host[:port]/module. It transmits your callsign, so set it before you key; AllStarLink identifies by node number instead.

D-Star needs a hardware vocoder dongle — its voice codec has no software implementation in astar — so it appears in the network picker only while one is attached. See Digital voice.

Bluetooth and AirPods. They work — they appear in the Mic and Speaker menus like any other device. Two caveats. First, the moment macOS starts using a Bluetooth headset's microphone, it drops the link into a voice mode and playback quality falls off noticeably; this is a macOS/Bluetooth behaviour, not an astar one, and it affects every app. If you care about receive audio, a wired or USB headset is better. Second, Bluetooth adds latency, so if you use VOX give yourself a longer Hang Timeout than you would on USB.

AirPods stem presses are not available to astar as a PTT button — macOS does not hand third-party apps those events. On AirPods, use VOX.

Getting help. Bugs and feature requests are welcome at github.com/rcludwick/astar/issues.

73 — AJ7HR