#digital radio

It verks!!!

www.stnydmr.net the Southern Tier (NY) DMR net was my first Digital Radio contact. I think it’s cheating, but it is neat. I transmit on my radio, (it’s a 144/440Mhz radio with APRS beacon built in plus digital) to a “hotspot.” The hotspot is a raspberry Pi computer with a HAT on the experiment pins that adds a transceiver. This hotspot then feeds your digital RF signal into the internet encoded to a specific Talk Group. People filter based on talk groups which can be geographic in nature or thematic. These talkgroups are broadcast by other hotspots individuals might have or repeaters and your internet signal becomes RF again.

So I transmit to a little radio hotspot in my house that encodes and pipes into the internet and then recieve replies from the internet and broadcasts it for me to pick up and hear. The World Wide TalkGroup had people in Connecticut talking with folks in Malaysia and Wales and South Africa this morning. It really opens up world radio with the internet bridge. I knew elderly ham radio operators in retirement who were not allowed antennas and missed their world band friends. And unlike Icom/Kenwood D-Star™ and Yaesu System Fusion ™ DMR (Motorola invention) is open source so affordable.

Now if we could only get Morse code versions…..