DMR or Digital Mobile Radio has interested and confused me for a long time. I know what it is, I know that it does work however I cannot get my head around all the different settings like Codeplugs and talkgroups so I decided to jump in and wing it.
As there are no DMR repeaters within RF distance I decided after owning 2 DMR radios for well over a year that I would never learn unless I jumped in and bought a hot-spot, also known as MMDVM which stands for Multi Mode Digital Voice Modem... So onto Amazon I went and purchased this ASHTA Hotspot.
The Hotspot arrived June 10th and I was so excited to get it home and play around with it. That's where the hair-pulling started, it took a while to set it up but for the life of me I could not get it to work... between special Codeplug entries, talk groups, zones.... arrrrgh... However, with the help of some online tutorials, links below, I was able to better understand how to get this thing running.
After playing about with it and still unsure of just what I was doing... I made contact through the VK3GWY internet gateway to several VK stations all in QSO on route to work. It was my first DMR contact with Australia and was good fun rag-chewing with these guys over the system. I did notice that despite being a digital mode, it is a little difficult to understand the robotic voice that is digital... analogue it most certainly is not.
Links to some of the videos I found quite helpful:
How to Build a Pi-Star Hotspot on Raspberry Pi 3
