I talked about ham radio digital voice briefly in my immediately previous post. Well, I’m gonna talk more about it today.
As the last post implied, the digital voice mode I have the most experience with is definitely D-STAR. At this point, the standard is well over 20 years old, and other arguably better digital voice modes have come along. The most popular is DMR, which I also mentioned in the last post, and a new truly open mode called M17 has come along as well. M17 is still a ways off, so I’m not likely to get into it any time soon.
So that leaves us with D-STAR and DMR. I’m involved with the Pride Radio Group, and we have a multimode network that has access from D-STAR and DMR both, but transcoding between the two does have a quality penalty. My understanding is DMR is the most popular digital voice mode on the network, so I dug my AnyTone D878UVII Plus back out and flipped my openSPOT3 over to DMR to connect to PrideDMR and discovered there’s an upper limit on password length on the openSPOT3. I worked with PrideDMR’s admin and was able to connect with this device. I’ve got it locked on the Worldwide PRIDE talkgroup on PrideDMR, so I’m good to chat away on the network regardless of where I am with the openSPOT3. It’s such a portable device! The D878 has APRS as well, which is always welcome. I just wish it had proper SmartBeaconing like Kenwood and Yaesu’s APRS-equipped radios, however.
Now that I’ve settled on DMR for the time being, there’s other unlicensed radio fun to talk about.
One subject that’s going around the Internet as of late are the two Mesh networks: Meshtastic and MeshCore. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and in the Pacific Northwest where I live MeshCore is used the most. In January, the Puget Sound Repeater Group did an educational session on MeshCore that I wanted to watch live, but I had to take a flight back to Atlanta for a dear friend’s funeral, so I watched the VOD when I got back from that trip. Incidentally, one of my college friends was playing with MeshCore and showed me a little about it. Anyway, after I watched the VOD I went on Amazon and picked up a LoRA board, flashed MeshCore to it, and I’ve talked on it more than I have on ham radio in a long while as it’s all text comms.
I’ve set my original LoRa board up as a home station, and I have a Lilygo T-Deck for a portable setup. I actually have 3 LoRa boards: the original, the T-Deck, and a third board I’d picked up to use as the firmware options for the T-Deck were a bit lacking at the time. Now that a much more featured firmware that allows it to work as a “companion” to a phone as well as from the device itself, this goes with me when I go out. I’ve even got a solar repeater to put outside at some point. I just need to do some measuring, and I’ll have it set up on our porch to hopefully allow for a more reliable connection to the greater mesh from home.
I still run APRS in the car most times I drive, so my Kenwood TM-D710A + Green Light Labs GPS-710 setup still works fantastic. I may one day pick up one of the equivalent AnyTone mobile radios, but the lack of SmartBeaconing is kind of pointing me at sticking to the D710 or maybe getting the Kenwood TM-D750. I guess if I had any real desire to talk on the local DMR repeater network I’d have already bought a mobile DMR radio, but considering how short most of my driving trips are these days, coupled with the fact that there’s one extremely good FM radio station here, maybe it’s time to time to set up a proper standalone mobile tracker for the car, then if I were taking a longer trip I could plug the openSPOT3 up in the car, tote my HT, and operate similarly to how we did on hamfest trips long ago with D-STAR. The D878 has Bluetooth and comes with a Bluetooth PTT I could strap to the steering wheel. There’s also a dedicated headset available, so that would let me operate mobile with the HT. It’s something to consider, though at this point I’m not sure how often I’d use this setup. Over the years I’ve had less and less desire to actually talk on the radio after all. Maybe that’ll change with the PRG’s network now that I’ve got my “main” hotspot device set up for operation on it.
Until next time!