Honestly, DMR is getting me excited about UHF/VHF amateur radio again. It’s not a NEW technology by any means, but the concept is really cool – I can have a drivetime chat with my buddies in Ohio, Alabama, and Iowa – assuming they have access to the repeaters.
The biggest challenge was wrapping my head around how the talkgroups and repeaters work – it’s similar, but different than programming a trunked radio system.
So – the next logical step after getting a portable and dipping a toe in the pool was a hotspot – a little internet connection node to use at home, since I’m marginally within the repeater coverage region.
I ended up with a “dual hat” module that plugs onto a raspberry pi – and after 2 months of being frustrated and thinking it was broken, i found my issue – it’s not an HS_Dual_hat at all… it’s an ” STM32-DVM / MMDVM_HS – Raspberry Pi Hat (GPIO)”. The documentation on this fact is pretty sparse, or I’ve just missed it a LOT. Turns out THIS SITE has a VERY good writeup on how to set things up from scratch. I guess the challenge is buying something that is delivered with minimal documentation… so finding (And then READING) in depth documentation is important.