W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

FediHams, a multiprotocol digital voice interconnect from DK1MI for Mastodon and the Fediverse

FediHams is a digital voice interconnection with support for multiple ham radio networks, put together by Michael DK1MI to support amateur radio use and experimentation for the Mastodon network.

For more info about FediHams and instructions on how to join, see its home page at https://fedihams.net . For details about Mastodon.radio - one participant in a federated set of servers sometimes known as the Fediverse - see https://mastodon.radio .

The network as it's currently constructed allows use by amateurs coming in on the Echolink, Allstar, Yaesu System Fusion, and Peanut networks, as well as to two different DMR networks (Brandmeister and TGIF). All of these nets require proof of amateur status to join. Not all of them require a purpose built hardware radio to connect; in particular, Echolink and Peanut were both tested with apps running on my Android mobile phone.

I connected to the FediHams network with three different configurations - Echolink (via phone), Peanut (via phone), and DMR (Brandmeister DMR via a DMR radio and my MMDVM gateway).

For Echolink, the configuration was easy because I already had the software running on my phone to support connections to the regular Sunday night net run by the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club. Use node DK1MI-L (963110) and you'll be added to FediHams. Please note, the Echolink use of Internet protocols doesn't always play nicely with modern firewalls, and I nearly always have to turn off wifi and connect through the data plan on my phone; your results may vary. If you don't already have Echolink installed, after you download it you'll need to validate your license via instructions at https://www.echolink.org/validation/ .

For Peanut, you'll want to download a client from the home base of David PA7LIM at https://www.pa7lim.nl/peanut/ and send in your proof of license via provided instructions. The software is provided for Windows (not tested) and Android. Once that is all set (it took a day for me), you can configure the app to connect to the channel of your choice and away you go. Please note that channel listings are provided via a drop-down menu keyed by country, and the YSF-FEDI channel is listed under the DE (Germany) menu. The user interface is a simple push-to-talk, and I found the sound quality quite pleasant especially because I could use a good headset on my phone.

I'm using the Brandmeister DMR network on my MMDVM hotspot, and a Radioddity GD-77 HT. Program your HT to connect to TG 2630002, and then check the Brandmeister network info page at https://brandmeister.network/?page=lh&DestinationID=2630002 to see your traffic. On my MMDVM hotspot status page, the connection shows up as TG DK1MI. MMDVM will start monitoring FediHams once your first transmission goes through. If you want to always have traffic to FediHams key up your radio, you'll need to connect to the Brandmeister "Self Care" page for your hotspot and add 2630002 as a static talkgroup.

My first test on FediHams was to use Echolink and DMR to both connect to the network at the same time and to talk to myself. Sound quality was fine, and the delay in transmission was about 4-5 seconds. (Delays come from the distance of the Internet connection from Ann Arbor to SW Germany, but also from delays associated with voice transcoding.) I even had a pretty respectable echo loop set up as the phone and the radio listened to each other.

More fun of course is an actual QSO with an actual person on the other end of the line. Michael DK1MI and I had a few nice conversations on 2022-10-11 - one part "how do I sound" of course, and also a discussion of how the network is put together and some hopes for future use. DK1MI has a blog at http://qrz.is which has details on a number of projects (hardware and software) with a ham radio theme.

This is my second go at getting a useful repeater configuration for use with Mastodon.radio. You can see my notes on the first try at https://vielmetti.typepad.com/w8emv/2020/07/feditalk-qso-dmr-brandmeister-tg-23514-with-m0yng.html where Christopher M0YNG and I both made a connection through a Brandmeister DMR TG. My hope is that the new FediHams setup will work with connections from a variety of networks and will also help discover new connections.

73!

Feditalk QSO (DMR, Brandmeister TG 23514) with M0YNG

Proof of work - photo courtesy Christopher M0YNG, showing his newly acquired display screen for his MMDVM hotspot.

This was unplanned! I happened to have the radio on as M0YNG was tuning up. We had a good 10 minutes chat about radios, tech in general, and how hard it can be to find the instructions to do anything technological because of the vast amounts of jargon in use across the board.

dmrconfig - a configuration utility for DMR radios

I have a Radioddity / Baofeng RD-5R DMR radio. I got it back in 2018, and have recently added an MMDVM hotspot for it to my collection.

One of the downsides of programming this particular radio is that CHIRP (which is used to program analog radios) is not available for DMR, and that the supported radio software only runs on Windows. And while Windows is fine, the rig I have to run that at home is an ancient Eee PC with a small screen that makes using the programming software awkward at best.

An alternative to the vendor software is dmrconfig, a configuration utility for DMR radios by Serge KK6ABQ. It supports a pretty good set of DMR radios including my RD-5R, and it runs on MacOS and on Linux. It lets you read and write codeplugs to the radio, and it helpfully converts your codeplug to a human readable file so that you can edit it in a text editor.

So far so good with dmrconfig - I've only used it once, but the programming looks like it took just fine. It's certainly a lot more helpful to have a format that can be backed up easily! It does however make me want to get a radio that can have more user entries in the database, the RD-5R is skimpy on that account.

Also noted but not tried yet: qdmr, which uses the same codebase as dmrconfig for radio codeplug writing but that offers a GUI for it. Worth a test another day.

Thanks to @witchy@mastodon.radio for the reference to dmrconfig - they are using an Anytone 878 radio with this particular setup.

radiosocial.org, a Mastodon instance for radio amateurs, is down; use mastodon.radio instead.

Addendum 2022-04-16 - radiosocial.org is down, and I'm using mastodon.radio run by Christopher M0YNG in its place. More on that in a future post.

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2018-06-03: radiosocial.org is a Mastodon instance for radio amateurs. It's a fairly new system in 2018, but already the local timeline is well dedicated to radio interests. It's run by Andy M1LOL (@ak).

Mastodon is a worldwide federated network of systems which run a social network. The user interface is reminiscent of Twitter, but the experience also has some element of Usenet News in that your account is tied to a particular server with an admin who has responsibilities both for system administration and some measure of local leadership.

I have long thought that I might be interested in finding such an online home for radio, and I'm encouraged by what I see so far. There are other ham networks out there, but it's always nice to get in on the start of something.