DMR Radios

[Oh_shift]

At December's meeting, the Colorado Connection group mentioned they are in the works of opening up a digital network. Sounded to be a ways out, not ready anytime soon.

However, their platform they were looking to use is DMR. As all brands have their own digital platform, which brand uses or promotes DMR?

 

[Stuckinthe80s]

I would like to know this as well.

Calling @DaveInDenver .....

 

[MountainGoat]

See https://www.rmham.org/wordpress/dmr-hardware-listing/ for some examples.

 

[DaveInDenver]

I have several DMR radios. The radio in my truck is a DMR/FM dual band 2m/70cm radio, a Connect Systems CS800D. I have a couple of Vertex Standard DMR/FM VXD-720 HTs and a Vertex Standard VXD-7200 UHF mobile I can use at home.

With respect to ham it's easier to say which radios aren't DMR.

Yaesu uses their own protocol called Fusion. Icom and Kenwood sell D-STAR radios. These protocols are not compatible with DMR despite them all being digital. It's like FM and AM and SSB. All of them are analog modulation techniques but they aren't capability with each other.

Anytone, Tytera and Connect Systems are the primary ham-specific brands right now. They are Chinese but all a decent quality, not the same as the illegal Baofeng. Commercial radios from Motorola, Kenwood, Vertex and Hytera will also work. These are more expensive and generally a bigger PITA getting software.

 

[DaveInDenver]

You should also be aware of digital hot spots. These traverse digital modes, so a DMR radio can talk on any of the other IP-linked systems and reflectors, be it Fusion, D-STAR, etc. AFAIK you still need a digital radio but once you have your signal encoded it's capable of being transformed.

What I mean by still needing a digital radio is that key component is the vocoder, voice encoder. This is the chip inside digital radios that does the audio analog to digital conversion and encodes it for use downstream. As of right now everyone is using the DVSI AMBE+2 chip, which isn't free and isn't open source. So since the hot spot are usually variations on freeware and open source they don't include any hardware that isn't cheap, e.g. some of them are built around Raspberry Pi.

https://www.sharkrf.com/products/openspot2/

http://www.pistar.uk

 

[PabloCruise]

Yaesu uses their own protocol called Fusion.

Interesting... My friend got a FT-70 and I thought it had DMR, but the Yaesu site says it is running Fusion.

Does Yaesu develop standards it thinks will be cool but do not end up getting adpoted? My FT-60 has ARTS which sounded cool, but my friend's 70 does not have it. When I looked up the FT-70 and ARTS I found very few mentions, including one post that said "No one uses ARTS".

 

[DaveInDenver]

Yaesu does not support DMR in any radio. Shortly after Motorola bought Vertex Standard they produced DMR radios that were rebadged Motorola XPR. I actually have a couple of those radios, one each of a VHF and UHF VXD-720 portable and a UHF VXD-7200 mobile. Somewhere during this time or right after Motorola spun off Yaesu back into a standalone company (Vertex Standard and Yaesu were the same company for many years) they brought out Fusion.

Looking back now had they brought it out sooner, maybe just a year, and people could have known the PITA DMR and linked repeaters and talk groups were going to be I think it would have caught on. It does have some features that make it more suitable for amateurs than DMR and a few improvements over D-STAR.

But c'est la vie. Here we are.

ARTS is a carryover from the commercial Vertex radios. It does serve a purpose having business and commercial radios be able to handshake with each other when they come into range. It's just not something terribly useful for hams. WIRES was before its time and lost to IRLP and Echolink because they were open source and could be mimicked without using Yaesu hardware. Now WIRES-X is just positioned wrong to Motorola IPSC, C-Bridges and Brandmeister.

It's not that they aren't doing novel and interesting stuff, it's just that they can't seem to gain traction soon enough to make their ideas the default. Fusion was is even offered royalty free, but it's still their IP and that probably rubs cheap hams wrong. I dunno. Technically there's nothing wrong with it. Basic DMR is open source and not really owned by any one company but it took a change to the FCC rules to make it strictly legal for hams to use.

 

[PabloCruise]

I had no idea Motorola owned Yaesu (via Vertex Standard) at one time!

 

[DaveInDenver]

I had no idea Motorola owned Yaesu (via Vertex Standard) at one time!

It was convoluted.

http://www.yaesu.com/jp/en/company/history.html

Yaesu Musen was the original company. It eventually owned Standard (business, land mobile radios) and Horizon (marine and aviation) and was later known as Vertex Standard for some years. Yaesu was the amateur radios.

Motorola acquired an 80% stake in Vertex Standard in 2008 and eventually split the ham and marine divisions from the land mobile stuff they wanted.

https://www.rrmediagroup.com/News/NewsDetails/NewsID/7799

In 2012 Motorola created Vertex Standard as a stand alone division of Motorola and gave the 20% minority stakeholder, Tokogiken, fully ownership of the rest. That went back to the original name of Yaesu Musen.

Now Vertex Standard is called Motorola Solutions and doesn't exist anymore.

 

[PabloCruise]

It was convoluted.

http://www.yaesu.com/jp/en/company/history.html

Yaesu Musen was the original company. It eventually owned Standard (business, land mobile radios) and Horizon (marine and aviation) and was later known as Vertex Standard for some years. Yaesu was the amateur radios.

Motorola acquired an 80% stake in Vertex Standard in 2008 and eventually split the ham and marine divisions from the land mobile stuff they wanted.

https://www.rrmediagroup.com/News/NewsDetails/NewsID/7799

In 2012 Motorola created Vertex Standard as a stand alone division of Motorola and gave the 20% minority stakeholder, Tokogiken, fully ownership of the rest. That went back to the original name of Yaesu Musen.

Now Vertex Standard is called Motorola Solutions and doesn't exist anymore.

That is a pretty concise summary!

Has Motorola truly fallen from greatness as Jim Collins claims?

 

[DaveInDenver]

He blames the two things as I understand it, not pursuing digital cell phones soon enough and not pulling out of Iridium early enough. I think modern companies are too short sighted and always chasing indeterminate trends. All the analysts and critics hate conservative companies that don't change much but in the long run isn't that exactly what *we* like, e.g. Toyota for example? I think Toyota has tried too hard to try to make itself seem market sensitive when they did best just doing what they do best, simple, reliable, affordable. Why is changing all the time become an indicator? If something works, why must it be changed?