petnrdx wrote:
We can't go a whole year with nothing from Nevada.
Had a good time at IWCE.
LOTS of new DMR vendors from China were there, other than that, mostly the same vendor stuff.
In the last couple months our local club has put up two MotoTrbo repeaters, and I heard a couple days ago that they now bought a third.
It is interesting that this has caught on so fast.
I can't say I understand the huge interest.
DMR is certainly better than D-Star in my opinion, but the interest in this is just HUGE.
I've been using the Seattle area DMR repeaters for a few months. It's different - The audio quality and low-signal performance is pretty good.
However - doing DMR isn't quite as versatile as D-star. The DMR radios are pretty much commercial products. FPP is not the norm, so you usually have to program with a computer and software. On the fly changes aren't so easy.
And, the local/regional/national/international talkgroup scheme can be limiting. Depending on what talkgroups the local C-Bridge administrator wants to carry, you many not be able to communicate or listen to other local areas. Example - if you were at IWCE in Vegas, and wanted to talk on a Vegas DMR repeater to a person up here in Seattle, you couldn't do it on the Washington Talkgroups. They aren't carried on that C-Bridge.
You would have to tie up a National level talkgroup to make the connection (in this case, another person and I used "COMM 1"). That took our conversation across the country, and potentially tied up a time slot on WAY too many repeaters.
We could have used another method to avoid that issue, but we just kept the conversation short.
DMR is very structured - and it is dependent on each local C-Bridge administrator to gauge what their needs are, and to manage the traffic. Because if they don't, the repeaters will carry too much traffic, and be less useful to everyone.
DMR isn't for everyone, and I believe the D-Star way is more versatile for the ham community in general.
But, I'm not a hater - I like both D-Star and DMR. You just have to understand how they work, what their limitations are, and know that they are just different.
And most of all - be thankful that there are hams willing to put up these repeaters (and put up with the associated headaches), and offer their usage to the amateur community (usually for free).
Thanks for the IWCE observations, BTW.
Brad.