OK, so last September I decided to see what I could learn about Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) as my first incursion into the digital voice part of the Amateur Radio Hobby. This was primarily a financially driven decision and there were several relatively inexpensive DMR handhelds that were on the market. Other digital voice radios include DStar, (primarily ICOM), System Fusion, (Yaesu), etc. I elected to go with the TYTera MD-380 which was a UHF only DMR radio that seemed to have an incredible following world-wide. (That turned out to be a wise decision).
The absolute first thing that hit me was “hey, I have to learn the language of DMR”. So many different terms, each of which I absolutely needed to understand just to get started!
“Radio Name – Radio ID – Color Code – Timeslot – Talkgroup – Zones and Channels – Codeplug”
A bit confusing, so I did my typical “immersion” in this new topic by looking at everything I could on-line, blogs, advertisements, youtube videos and finally papasys.com (which was an incredible resource) – I also turned to Amazon Kindle Books and purchased a copy of “The DNA of DMR Programming the TYT MD-380 Digital Mobile Radio”. Eventually, I also joined the “TYT MD-380 Tools” group on Facebook.
Slowly but surely it started coming together. I will try to give you *MY* explanation of each, then ask you to also read about them on the first part of the DMR 101 pages at Papasys.com – between the two, you should come away with a fair start on the “language of DMR”
“Radio Name” was nothing more than my call sign.
“Radio ID” was a unique number for ME on DMR – programmed into my “codeplug” it would tell the world that it was Dave W6TUX who was keying into a talkgroup, (acquired from DMR-MARC – more on this below).
“Color Code” = works a lot like an analog repeater’s PL code.
“Timeslot” – was easy – in DMR there are only timeslot 1 or 2. I had a leg up here as I was involved in Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) radio while still in the Navy.
“Talkgroup” kind of threw me for a little while, until I associated it with early Internet “Chatrooms” – Talkgroups are just like them, but instead of typing you are talking! 😀
“Zones and Channels” is where the rubber meets the road for keeping things organized. “Zones” provides a way to keep a group of up to 16 “Channels” organized. You could have a “Zone” set up for a specific DMR Repeater like “Home OTAY”, then up to 16 Channels pointing to talkgroups available on that repeater, (I am taking a bit of author’s license here but please bear with me) – conversely, you could have a Zone named “Analog” with up to 16 Channels pointing at regular Analog FM repeaters, say something like “My Analogs” with pointers to my favorite UHF repeaters I’d like to access with my MD-380. (Hope that makes a mocum of sense).
“Codeplug” – this is one of the more difficult parts of DMR, but it doesn’t have to be. You can download the most recent codeplug from Papasys.com for example – then modify the “General” settings therein with your own “Radio Name” (Call sign), and “Radio ID” from DMR-MARC (see below). Save it – upload it to your radio – and start operating it that day. Of course, if you want to do some serious modification like the My Analog Zone & Channels I mentioned earlier, then you might want to get a copy of that book and be prepared for some more serious learning/work. I tend to think of a Codeplug as kind of a series of interrelated spread-sheets. Loads of very unforgiving data, kind of easy to mess up – but well worth the effort to learn in the long run.
DMR-MARC and your Radio IDs: Some folks think you absolutely need a Radio ID for each and every DMR Radio – but really, you can use the same ID on multiple devices, say a base and mobile, as long as they are not on the air at the same time. Most folks will only need 1 or 2 Radio IDs, (multiply by 2 if your XYL is a ham). 😀 Before you can communicate on *any* of your DMR radios you will first have to gain at least 1 ID from: https://www.dmr-marc.net/cgi-bin/trbo-database/register.cgi
If you read over the page there in detail, you will see what I mean about the real concern is avoid having the same ID in use on two devices at the same time.
Well – that should be enough to get you started if you desire to get into DMR Radio as an Amateur, (hope I haven’t scared you off). There are a few more “new” terms to learn, but the above is a really good start. When you get over to DMR 101 at papasys.com you will learn that things are simplified greatly by the folks at brandmeister.network <–yes, that is a valid link! Go ahead and browse around that Brandmeister site – you can figure out how to listen to DMR conversations with just your computer and web browser… Find out what each Talkgroup out here is about. Be ready to be impressed with the sheer number of talkgroups – after all, we are talking world wide here. 😉
Update – a thought on Codeplugs. In case you are wondering why I am promoting the use of the Papa System provided codeplug for DMR in California – the February 2018 version of it has 69 examples of Zones built in, and over 950 examples of Channels Information. Spend a little time browsing through that file and you can find what you are looking for and edit it to suit your own needs. Very, very good stuff by Papasys and *VERY* much appreciated by this Ham! <two thumbs up>
Here is a hint – setting up your own Hotspot and need to set up your codeplug on your radio to access it? Have a look at the Zone “HotSpot 441.025” and those Channels Information examples that start with “HS”. I can just about guarantee you can edit the Zone name to reflect your own simplex frequency – then edit each of the Channels information to reflect that same simplex frequency – save it – upload it to your radio – and if your hotspot is working all you have to do is select that zone in your radio and start dialing up the associated talkgroups. 😉