Ham Radio 360: DMR with K1RJZ (Digital Mobile Radio)

I’ve owned a DMR radio for about 6 months now. I’ve not made one contact with it! I even loaned it to a friend to see if he could unlock the magic, no dice.

While at Dayton, I met Rick Zach K1RJZ at the DMR-MARC booth early one morning and began asking questions about DMR. I soon knew that I needed to have Rick on the show to help demystify this new-fangled radio technology and help get me on the air!

DMR or Digital Mobile Radio is one of the hottest things happening in the Ham Radio Hobby right now. Commercial success of the mode has driven down the prices and made it accessible to the Amateur Radio hobbyist. Join us to learn how this exciting mode is quickly becoming a game changer!

DMR-MARC is an all volunteer organization that has been tasked with keeping DMR in order for the community. If you are interested in getting on the air with DMR, DMR-MARC should be one of your first stops!

“ Rick, K1RJZ got back to us with a mispronunciation that he’d like to correct. The multi format DMR networking platform is pronounced BRANDmiester and not BANDmiester. He knew the correct name, but it just needs a correction “

Notes from Jeremy:

Tytera MD-380 Hacking: https://github.com/travisgoodspeed/md380tools

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Things I wish I had known when programming the MD-380

This is a good primer to terms and concepts: http://dmr-marc.net/media/Amateur_Radio_Guide_to_DMR_Rev_I_20150510.pdf

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The radio has 16 “channels” but a LOT of Zones. a Zone is a collection of channels.

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Every Channel can have a scan list and a RX list. The Scan List is a list of channels that can be scanned if you tell the radio to scan while on that channel – useful if you want to scan both timeslots of the same repeater, for instance.

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RXLists are lists of all of the talkgroups associated with a timeslot on the repeater. For instance, for my local K8BIG, I have two RXLists – KABIG-TS1 and K8BIG-TS2. All groups that appear on Time Slot 1 are in TS1 and same for TS2.

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Worldwide, Worldwide English, and North America aren’t for rag chewing – think of these as calling channels. Once contact is made, you can take your conversation over to one of the “tactical” talkgroups such as TAC-310 or TAC-311 (depending on whether or not your repeater has these talkgroups). These talkgroups are only active when someone calls for them via Push to Talk.

Thanks for listening!

73 Y’all

K4CDN