I attended my club's meeting tonight, and we had a couple guests show up to make a DMR presentation. There is more support in DFW than I thought. Jason Johnston, of Grapevine Amateur Radio Store, made the presentation and he also demo'd a couple DMR radios. We discussed installing a DMR repeater on our club antenna, and that is in the works. A couple radios in particular were the RFinder Android Radio and Tablet. Pretty cool devices. I think that they only use AT&T and T-Mobile, though. One of the other visitors was Jesse Greenberg, of RFinder, which either designed the radios or was part of it. He is in DFW for HamCom, but traveled a couple hours to visit our small club.
Several members of my club have been using D-Star for some time, and I still plan on getting started. However, having a DMR repeater in my back yard would make it impossible not to utilize DMR as well.
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. --Theodore Roosevelt--
Looking like the price of the Monobanders TYT DMR HTs is coming down, may have to get one. Several buddies talking about converting 6.73 (old packet repeater) to DMR.
Did pickup a UV-5R with extended batt pack and cable, amazing what $35 will buy you.
Really wish someone would make a SDR mobile that supports Dstar/DMR/Fusion to end the brand specific stuff.
So, after a few years break from radios, my recent camping trip into BFE with no cell service has me wanting to get back into the hobby. So, I am thinking about biting the digital bullet as opposed to trying to spin up all of my old analog stuff.
Question: I was going to go digital a year or so ago, but what stopped me at the time was all the radios needed a Windows based computer to program them. Is this still the case, or is there no Mac software that will program the DMRs???
I'm not going to buy a windows computer, so I hope I am not still SOL. Thanks!!!
U.S. Army vet. -- Retired 25 year LEO.
For the most part, analog will be more reliable in BFE than digital. There are exceptions, but they are very few if even at all. Digital requires internet.
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. --Theodore Roosevelt--
That makes sense. Thanks. I'd still like to dip my feet in the digital pool though for other applications. Anything Mac compatible, like Chirp?
For camping and 4x4 excursions, there are tons of analog repeaters up in the hills. I can take my old Kenwood handheld and ping something from just about anywhere.
U.S. Army vet. -- Retired 25 year LEO.
Generally speaking, DMR is designed for the professional/Land-Mobile market, and all the supporting programming software will require Windows.
For long-haul/Nationwide/Global that's true. That said, I don't know of any DMR radios that won't do analog modes or simplex-digital. All the DMR repeaters in my area have local talkgroups that operate like traditional repeaters.
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