W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

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

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.