DMR for Beginners — How to Connect to Your Local Repeater

hey everybody this is ron with bridgecom systems i am here live in smithville missouri uh it's st patrick's day so i want to wish you all a happy st patrick's day got my green on ready to go anyway we're going to do a deep dive here on how to program your brand new any tone dmr radio to hit a local repeater we've got a lot of new folks coming into our world and we're you know wanting to help you guys be successful and so we do a lot of these live streams but i wanted to do another one where we show you guys how to talk on a local repeater which is pretty important i know there's hot spots and all these different things that are going on in the in the dmr world but you know if you're brand spanking new to dmr this video or this live stream is for you it will be recorded and we will make this content available for you to look at afterwards we did one of these a while back and it got a lot of rev a lot of views so people definitely are needing this content so if you're new to dmr and you're new to any tone and you're new to bridgecom systems then this video and this live stream is for you so anyway real quick i want to make you guys aware of something that we're doing it's going to end on the 21st of this month uh march 21st we are doing a what's called the 73 ham radio giveaway and this one's a big one and uh i've seen some stuff on the uh message boards uh bridgecom doesn't give away anything and all this all just no we do give these products away in fact you can go to our website and we actually show you the previous winners of all the stuff that we've given away as you guys you know you guys may go to ham fest and you know one of the things that keeps everybody you know excited about being at ham fest is the the drawings i mean i've been to a lot of ham fest and of course the raffles and things like that get everybody excited and stuff and so we you know because of all the you know the fact that we can't go to ham fest right now i know i know they're ticking back up but we've been doing these giveaways for a while and so in the spirit of that we're doing this giveaway it's called the seven three giveaway we're giving away a 578 three pro a duracom power supply to go with that an 18 amp power supply by the way an any tone tri-band antenna to for your uh that will work with your uh 578 then we've given away the 578 uv plus subscriptions for all three radios uh that would be the um the five seven eight the eight seven eight and of course the uh um i think the hot spots there but at the bridgecomm university we're doing the we're giving away a g90 uh hf rig that's going to be really cool for whoever gets that so if you're not into hf that would be a really neat thing to have so all the fixings for a g90 that which include the not only the transceiver but the antenna the cooling bracket uh bca300 dual band mag mount antenna uh tanner should put up there he's got the link up there already great and then bcs 200 uh water speaker mic water resistant speaker mic and battery and belt clip all valued at and then we're gonna ship it to you by the way uh 1968.11 cents is the value on that and we encourage you to enter it's available to those that have an amateur radio call sign so if you don't have a ham radio license you need to get one and that is the first step of this journey that we're going to talk to you guys about so let's jump in we are going to go through the process of from step by step on how to take your brand new any tone radio your dmr radio out of the box and get it to talk on a local repeater so let's get started okay so you just got your radio and you want to get on the air as quick as possible one way is to find and connect with a local dmr repeater and by the way uh this i'm going through these show notes hopefully you guys are you got a link there in your uh platform to to get these uh tanner who's managing the chat put post those up for me and what you can do is walk through these and then again of course they're gonna this recording will be made and you can then go through the uh live stream uh later if you'd like and do the steps but i am going to go step by step into this process of taking a radio out of the box i've already got out of the box by the way and i'm going to show you how to connect it to a dmr repeater so one of the things the first step that you need to do that hopefully all of you have done is you need a ham radio license to play in this sandbox if you've not gotten a license yet i want to encourage you to do that i know that ham radio maybe it's seen its glory days i would argue not i think that it's an ongoing journey for everybody i realize there's not that the the population uh folks that are doing ham radio is uh it's kind of stabilized in the united states i see that it's about 800 000 licensed amateurs i want to encourage you to do that i actually uh i was able to get my sons they're i think they were like 14 and 15 at the time i uh sent them to a class and in two weeks they were able to get their technician licenses and so i exposed them to all this so i want you to uh you know that's the first step in this journey is get your ham radio license and when you get your ham radio license that opens up the door to all this other stuff and one of them being dmr dmr is a digital platform that is taking the amateur radio community by storm right now it's a uh it's a technology that's came out of the commercial space and it's been adopted by us amateurs in the last 10 years uh it's it's we've got dmr repeaters popping up all over the country and in fact all over the world you've got these hot spots that folks can actually put you know effectively a repeater in their back pocket it's really helped the uh it's just really opened up you know the ability to make uh contacts which is what we're all wanting to do we want to be successful we want to meet other people in the community we you know it's it's awesome to say your call sign over there over the air and by the way my call sign is kilo charlie zero quebec victor tango um i just got my amateur extra class last december before that i got general in in july but i got my license back in 2003 so i camped on the technician class for you know 16 17 years before before i upgraded i know shame on me but the technician class is all you need to do this so the first step that you want to do after you get your after you get your amateur radio license is that you need a dmr id so i'm going to put that up here you got to get a dmr id now this is going to be your telephone number okay and you're wanting you want to go to a website called radio id.net okay this is a must you cannot do anything further until they issue you an id and this i don't know how many contacts have been issued like it's getting close to a couple hundred thousand now but it wasn't long ago it was uh you know below a hundred thousand so you need to go to radioid.net and without this dmr id you cannot communicate on all these uh all these networks so i'm going to jump into the computer real quick and i want uh i want to show you what's going on on radioid.net so i've got a link in the show notes and if you want to follow along so on step one here we've got radioid.net and i am going to go oops let's see i want to go to that website there we go all right now radio radioid.net is the database this is this is the the place where everybody goes to get their their their telephone number to work in dmr so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to this database i'm left clicking over on the left side and i'm going to go to this dmr user id search okay now down there at the there's a there's a sign in and registration and that's where you want to go so i'm going to go ahead and type in what i've already done i'm going to go down here to my call sign kc0qvt and i'm going to search and from this i'm going to extract my dmr id now i've probably got this committed to memory but just for the sake of showing you that's me at the bottom my dmr id is three one two three one two there's some advertisements going on there three one two nine one seven two nine one seven two so that's me ron and i am keith kc0qvt okay and you're gonna have your own dmr id and that's what you need to do so let's just go back to home here real quick and there should be a registration let's see continue okay login sign up you want to go to that page and that is where you want to create an account or get your uh dmr id from that so if you haven't done that go do that okay but in the meantime i'm going to continue on as if you know you've got your dmr id and now we're going to find a local repeater that we're going to want to talk on okay so the next step is you're going to find a local repeater and i'm going to jump back over here to my notes and the next the next best place now this is you know there's probably other places but you got your ham club that you can talk to or some friends of yours but the best place i've found to find a local dmr repeater is repeaterbook.com okay so you want to use this website to search your area for a repeater that's on the air that's closest to you so it gives you the best possible chance so i'm going to go ahead and click on that too and i'm going to take you to that website it's a great resource it seems i mean it's only it's a what i found is it's contributed the users contribute their credentials for the repeater and then of course they update it it's another database that uh these folks put put on the guy that runs this website's name's garrett really nice guy okay so i'm in north america i'm gonna go over to the left side here and this is gonna allow for me to search north american repeaters and then of course if you're outside the united states you can look for uh all the world simplex nodes even gmrs is available on here now so that's really cool so if you're into gmrs which stands for general mobile radio services you can go find some gmrs repeaters which is pretty cool so i'm going to click on north american repeaters and that should pull up a map of the united states and you want to zero in on the state that you're currently in and i'm in missouri and this is going to populate with missouri amateur radio repeaters okay and we've got all the listings by city and town and you can take that approach and you've got repeaters recommended for use by nearby highways so that's a real good resource you've got emergency service repeaters they've really segmented out all these repeaters based on what their purpose is now the the area that we want to focus in is the uh the features okay now they've segmented out these repeaters based on their functionality you've got dmr repeaters d-star repeaters echo link fusion p25 nxdn all-star wires okay we want to go to dmr so we're going to find all the dmr repeaters in missouri i guess i got a an ad come up on me oops i hope that doesn't go off okay all right so these are all the dmr repeaters and you'll know their dmr repeaters because you can see over on the left side here you're going to see what's you'll see the cc and a number associated with it and that stands for color code okay so we are going to look through this list okay and this is what what's going on now i'm in clay county missouri and i see this repeater right here and there's the adjacent county is platte county okay i want to go ahead i'm going to try this repeater right here uh kc kansas city kci airport in platte county says it's open and it says it's dmr and then you're going to see this thing over here that says branmeister or bm okay that's we're gonna dig into that here in a minute okay so let's just go ahead and click on this link here real quick and this is gonna pull up the credentials for this repeater okay and of course referencing this your notes there's uh some key metrics that you need to pay attention to and the two key metrics of course is the transmit receive frequency of the repeater in this case the downlink is 444.4 so i'm going to go over here and i'm going to put on our board here find a repeater because that's what we're after we're wanting to find a repeater and that's going to obviously be local to where you are okay so we want a we want uh transmit frequency we want the uh receive frequency uh the second or the third credential is we want the color code stands for cc we want uh we want the time slot okay time slot all right now i'm not going to get too detail in that but dmr allows for two conversations to happen on one frequency pair and they call it time slot one and time slot two now both of these conversations can happen at the same time and you don't even know it it's all happening so fast uh that you don't even see it um so just keep in mind so that there's two uh two conversations that can happen you got time slot one and time slot two and it's important to know this because as you'll see here the system operators of these various repeaters are wanting you to be on a specific time slot for your specific purpose and we're going to see that here we can see that this dmr id of this repeater is 31932 we don't really need to know about that at this point but the color code which is important is four so we're going to look at color code 4 for this repeater and i just remembered i got to put the uh frequencies here so the down link is 444.4625 okay and so that repeater is going to transmit on four four four wait is that right yeah four four four dot four six two five and it's going to receive on four four nine okay now the reason i kind of got confused is because you have to flip these for your radio and of course uh in my experience i've never really talked about downlink and uplink i've always thought receive and transmit so the repeater their uh down link is their transmit and uplink is their receive and of course the offset's five megahertz it says dmr enabled okay this tall group network it states it's the backyard repeater group now uh the backyard repeater group is a just a group of guys that have put together a network of repeaters all over the kind of missouri kansas i don't know if they're in iowa maybe nebraska but it's a network that has a specific talk group and all these repeaters are assigned to to one specific talk group so we you know we want to definitely uh be mindful of their wishes and again these these repeaters are private property they're not just you know i can use them whenever you know they're they're open to us as amateurs but you know we definitely want to respect their uh the wishes of the operators and talk on the appropriate time slots that they ask for so you can see down here in the notes it says use time slot one for all other brand meister talk groups cbyrg website for talk group assignments okay now there's a thing here called talk groups when i can look at this open talk group view okay it says local cluster talk group two nine uh local or fl kc ares there's some uh skywarn byrg time slot two thirty one two it's full time okay but we're going to comply with that and we want to be on time slot one okay so i'm going to circle that here with red because we don't want to be on anything but time slot one because that's we don't want to mess up anybody else anybody else's business okay so time slot one so there's one more item that needs to be inspected because one of the things that's happening in uh in this dmr world is that there's a lot of these networks but we're gonna uh look at bran meister okay because that's what this repeater is connected to okay and brandmeister is a huge network it's probably one of the it was one of the early days that came out uh it it probably is the second network that kind of came on the scene after uh what was called dmr mark but these folks have put servers up all over the world uh they'll get these guys that want to put up a server in fact in the united states i believe there's three servers they call them 3101 3102 and i think 3103 and they're set up and they're administered by the brandmeister folks so we can see right here that the affiliate is the brand meister network so we're going to concentrate on that and just as a side note there as i stated there's dmr mark or what might become called uh ip ipsy connect or two there's a bunch of servers come that have come about that are other networks that you can get on there's also the tgif network dmr plus but anyway we're going to focus on brandmeister because that's one of the popular ones and it's probably where you're going to have a higher probability of connecting with your local repeater so once you get your dmr id you want to set up a self-care account on brandmeister okay so i'm going to go back to my notes here and i am going to go to this website called brandmeister network okay and i'm going to show you that now this is the network page their website that talk about all the stuff that's going on on this network it's a really it's a nice resource you can see that like right now at this moment there's 5084 repeaters 16892 hotspots there's 180 voice calls taking place 44 masters that's like what i was saying earlier they have numbers like 3101 3102 3103 and you can see that this uh is a well attended to highly i mean these guys are these guys are good okay that these guys are that are making this this information available to you really are passionate about this this product and it's really cool to feature these guys uh you got to give i mean they probably you know get a lot of grief but you know they're doing a lot of work and i'm really happy to you know to get get behind these guys and and just them you know show them i know there's a lot of other networks and these they're rock stars just as well but you know they're really helping the amateur radio community so what you want to do after you get your dmr id is it's a good idea to go over here and get you a self-care account or register so you want to register with brand meister let them know you're around this is eventually if you if you go into get a hot spot and then want to play around even further but this is the this you know the next step in the journey so go in there and mark that on your list for stuff to do is to get a uh register on on their platform okay again comply with the wishes of the system operator the station and talk on the appropriate time slot you know effectively be a good neighbor you know that's what that's what we've learned that you know part 97 is is a it's about being a good ham okay so now that we've identified the repeater we want to hit the next step is to program the radio okay but before we do that i well now i'll take that let's go ahead and start programming the radio let's get the radio set up okay so it's item number three says install the cps on your windows machine and make sure the radio and the firmware in agreement okay i've already installed the cps on this machine i didn't want to take a lot of time to do that it is a pretty quick and painless process you just go to our website uh our support page we have the all the versions of the any tone eight seven eight eight six eight and five seven eight uh cpss so uh i want you to do that but anyway before we get started let me go ahead and get this radio back to a known state of out of the box okay now i've been using this radio for several live streams in the past and i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to make it brand new so and this is a tactic you can use if let's say you get down the road and things just go hey why are your radios something's not right everything's screwed up i don't know what happened and it's all just gone bonkers on me what you can do is initialize the radio and what this will do is it'll restore the radio to factory defaults and so i'm going to show you how to do that it's kind of a little bit of bonus content here in the live stream so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to turn the radio off okay i'm going to press and hold the ptt button and then i'm going to press and hold the other button which is called it's the side button it's the one right below ptt and i'm going to turn it on and hold it says okay now this is what you want you want to are you sure you want to initialize the radio okay so i'm basically going to just clean the slate here and i'm going to hit confirm and now it's going through this initialization process and wiping out all that work we did now by the way before i did that i did go back and save my profile i did pull that out so that i didn't lose all that work okay so it's got this calibrate date i'm going to just hit confirm okay and this is what you'll see when you uh turn your radio on for the first time so i'm going to hit confirm okay and it's going to come up with a little splash screen says welcome any tone and it's going through its boot up sequence okay got that so this is the radio in its virgin state as if it's never been programmed before and of course the the the display uh darkens after about five seconds i don't like that i'll fix that here in a second but we'll learn on customizing the radio as we roll down the road here okay so one of the things that we want to do right away is we want to go in and we want to find out the version of firmware that's in your radio so you want to go to settings then you want to go down here to device info okay this radio id is one two three four five six seven eight my radio it's an 878 uv 420 to 450 okay version of firmware is 1.21 okay so we want to we that's what i need i need that for 1.21 all right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to connect my programming cable to the radio and again this is connected to my usb hub here i'm going to insert that and make sure it's really snug you want to definitely uh you know apply some pressure because sometimes you know it doesn't work it doesn't work and you know might be you just didn't plug it in uh all right are we in focus somebody says we're not in focus so okay so i'm going to go over here into the computer and i've already installed 1.21 right there you can see where my cursor is kind of moving around just to kind of get that focus okay so i'm going to right click on the program and i'm going to run as an administrator okay now i highly recommend you run all these cps in your windows platform at at the administrator level and for whatever reason it makes windows like everything a lot better and it reduces the chances of some issues okay so you want to allow this app to uh from an unknown publisher yes and by the way i'm using a a um a cambio i believe it's a cambio uh uh tablet computer running windows 10. i picked this up off amazon i know i don't know if it's available anymore okay so okay it looks like it's remembering some previous data from the previous uh live stream so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to set the com make sure i'm good okay i'm on com3 okay i'm going to go ahead and read from my radio okay so it did remember my previous store okay that's that's a feature of the cps so i'm going to override all that save file okay yep okay so i'm going to read from the radio here okay there it's reading okay so it's reading how the radio comes out of the box and there it is right there all right so we out of the box are on all these different frequencies okay and we don't want those so i'm just going to quickly go through and i'm going to delete all these so i'm going to click delete you can use your hotkey just clean the slate okay because we don't want any of them okay so on item four we identified the com port being red that's your okay and we read from the radio we saw our default profile i deleted all that so that ends page two so uh we've already uh number five we look up you wanna before you start you wanna look up your dmr id and program it into the radio and of course we uh did that right here okay all right so i'm gonna quickly just uh we got an item number one dmr id you found your repeater which we know and let me mix we want um we got four four four four four dot four six two five four 449.4625 and i'm going to clean the the board here and we got color code 4 we're on time slot 1 and we are on brand master so we're good to go those are the items that you need to be successful so i'm going to delete i'm going to delete i'm going to erase i've been deleting a lot of stuff all right so i'm going to erase that and i'm going to give you a quick a quick uh step-by-step deal on what you have to do here and i'm going to draw in somebody so okay so you want to first of all you want to program oh you want to uh let's just let's get this right here put dmr id in the radio okay then you want to uh pro put in talk groups or well i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and write that out because some of you guys may not know what a talk group is okay so we're going to talk about talk groups and number three we're going to create channels number four we're going to create a zone you got to create a zone we'll find that out here and create a zone and then we're going to put channels in a zone and then we are going to write radio and test okay so these are the steps that we're going to take to and i and i'm going to go through each one of these in detail here in the context of our uh step by step here but that's what's going on so i know what my dmr id and i did not three i think three one two i have not committed that to memory i should so i'm gonna just go back over here to radioid.net and it's gonna be my handy-dandy memorization tool i know it's three one two something okay so i'm going to remember that that's one thing i didn't oops and one thing i will say you know as an encouragement to you all three three one two nine one seven two just take your time i know i might be you know speeding through this uh i'm i've done this a lot and i but i want you guys to not despair take your time and walk through this process you will be successful you are gonna get it done it's not that hard i know it might be new to a lot of you p you know a lot of you guys a lot of you guys because you know you're you're coming in from an analog world you've been talking on analog repeaters you know for the better part of your amateur radio career moving into dmr and talking on these digital repeaters is uh it's a whole new world it is it can be intimidating but i think when we just you know take a step-by-step approach you work with a mentor an elmer or whatever and that's what i'm trying to do for you guys right now you you can do this and you will and we will demonstrate uh talking on a repeater today and anyway i'm gonna get back into it here uh so we got i had to get my dmr id 312 9172 okay now let's jump back into the computer here and where you do that where you put the dmr id is you go over here on the left side and you uh you you press this button right here and that causes this node to expand okay and you're going to see radio id list okay this is where you want to put your dmr id you can see where it said one two three four five six seven eight and that's what we saw when we turned it on up there so we're gonna left double click on that and we're gonna put in three one two nine one seven two that's my telephone number in the dmr world so i'm going to call this uh i'll just call it my name kc0 and my call sign kc0 qvt ron whoops wrong that's mean okay so that's all you got to do okay so put radio id let's check that let's go blue here we we did that check box all right okay so now let's jump down here to the talk groups okay now let's talk about talk groups talk groups are basically places where people can go on every if you have if everybody's on the same talk group number you're in that club and you can talk to all people that are listening on that talk group so it's just what it is a group it's a group of people and gathering in one place liking it together in one place and everybody that has assigned that particular talk group to their radio and is monitoring it they will hear what you have to say because you're all in agreement you're all you're all talking on the same in the same room it's like you know if i have a guy right here and i'm talking to him they're wearing the same talk group and then of course another person can join anybody that's in that group will listen to it's like you know like right now we have a group we've got we're talking through uh facebook and youtube and we have a group here so we're likening that to a talk group so there's these numbers assigned to those groups so what you're doing is effectively applying an a number to an a group of folks and then of course there's an alpha tag if you will associated with those groups so you've got groups for all kinds of different reasons for folks to gather you have groups for each state you have groups for countries you have group numbers and names assigned to interests for example there could be i've seen several interest groups uh well but i'll tell you what let me do this let me show you real quick let's jump out here and i'll just take you into that so you can see in the computer here i put this link in here in your notes so that you can actually see all the groups that you have available to you so down on the second page here oops not too far okay brandmeister has a bunch of talk groups in its network okay each network has a bunch of talk groups associated with it and they're all predetermined so we're going to click on there's a website right here and this website is going to show you all the talk groups the names and the numbers for brandmeister now it says here there's 1613 available talk groups and that's actually grown i think the last time i looked at this it was around fifteen hundred and change okay so they're adding more talk groups okay and you can see here there's a talk group number and a name associated with themselves okay so you've got local regional worldwide north america we're going to actually tune into north america you got all the various countries there's country-wide talk groups you've got these tac channels tax stands for talk around channel you've got oh cities hong kong's a city in china uh they have their own talk group uh so anyway yeah camping here for a place that you might want to check out you've got various regions i don't know what those are about districts not sure what those are uh but anyway this is the how big the sandbox is you've got some folks in denmark regional sm01 i have no idea what that is fi aoh1 i mean these there's a lot of i don't know talk groups for specific purposes out there so we're going to go down here in the united states that's where these guys camp out right here you've got every state in the united states has a talk group like alabama 3101 alaska 3102 and missouri 3129 okay so going back to our notes we want to set up the talk groups and what the two essential talk groups that you're going to want in your radio is a talk group disconnect and a parrot okay you want those in your listing of channels for the repeater you're going to talk on okay now these talk groups you can assign them to a bunch of different channels but we're going to set these up in a list and basically what we're going to do here and you'll hear this as you as you journey with you know in this space you're going to hear the term code plug okay basically what we're going to do or what we're doing right now is we are making our own code plug from scratch you'll hear and i don't even the code the term code plug it came out of uh it's it's from the good old days uh something something to do with uh oh heck somebody told me one time anyway i'm not gonna get into that i just just be keep in mind it's called a code plug you hear people talk about that basically it's the profile we're gonna create and you'll see that there's going to be already predetermined code plugs from other that other people have created and you can plot those in your radio but basically we're going to roll our own code plug all right so again the two essentials is the talk group disconnect and the parrot and then of course if you look down even further i said we're going to try to make a cue so on missouri statewide and north america and you can see here that the missouri statewide as i showed you earlier is taught group 3129 and north america is 93. okay so we're going to put four talk groups in this radio or this code plug okay so i'm going to alt tab over here and i'm going to pull up my cps again all right and what we're going to do is we're going to go over here where that said radio id list we're going to go down where it says contact talk groups now they don't spell contact right but that's okay we know what they mean all right so this is the talk or the context for our talk groups and we're going to create four of these talk groups so they've got one in here by default and i'm going to left double click on that and it's going to pull up this list of these where you put your credentials so we want talk group disconnect so i'm going to type in tg i'll just type in disc for disconnect it is a group call and it is 4 000 okay and i'll just alt tab over here real quick and you can see if i scroll down here 4000 says disconnect okay now let me really quick tell you what you need a disconnect helps you just read i do see your comments folks and i'm gonna i'm gonna get into that okay i'll answer your questions the best i can once i get get done with this okay but um a uh a disconnect is important because what it allows for you to do after you have your exchange your conversation with somebody it allows for you to tell the repeater that i'm done and it will disconnect that talk group from the repeater because when you make a con when you engage that repeater on a specific talk group it tells the repeater resource i'm going to dedicate your time slot for a specific block of time to to routing traffic from that talk group uh from that talk group to uh you your needs so the talk group disconnect is essential because after you have your cuso you want to hit you want to tell the station like uh i'm done and it will then now go back uh whatever it's doing so now somebody else can and use the resource as well because it buys you a block of time every time you hit every time you make a contact or every time you uh hit the ptt button in exchange with your repeater so talk group disconnect is is is really essential and you'll also note here it's called it's a group call now why it's a group call it's because you're telling the repeater that you know and all parties involved the repeaters like i'm i'm shutting down those two types of calls there's a group call and there's a private call most of the activity that we're going to do on our repeaters is all group calls you rarely will use a private call and the only private call that i've ever used is what we're going to talk about next and that's the parrot the parrot is a private call to your repeater now i'm aware that there's other talk group numbers that allow for you to do a private call as a group call but i'm not going to get into that right now just be in keep in mind a parrot is a private call so let's go ahead and and store this here real quick talk group disconnect group call talk group id uh dmr id or it's the number is 4000 okay so let's do another one this is what let's just to let's do the parrot so i'm gonna call it parrot okay and it is a private call okay you can see that list it's got group private call group call and all call it's app it's a private call and it's 99 99.90 okay and i'll take you over here to the brand meister uh talk group list and i'll go down to 99.90 okay okay you got 9990 right there parrot okay now the parrot is a must okay i'm gonna store this okay private call a parrot is a must i highly recommend putting a parrot in or the parrot talk group on all the different repeaters you want to talk on because it's instant feedback to know did everything i do work okay without the parrot you kind of you just hey you know you know you do your proper qso announcements you know you're not your call sign and you can you know you're trying to wait on somebody to respond to you the parrot is a way to say i know that repeater heard me it came back i can get into it okay so before you can really have a good time with all this it's good to know that you're getting into the repeater the repeater hears you you hear the repeater and all's well and the parrot is awesome way to test that functionality okay so you need the parrot now the next two talk groups that we're going to try and make a contact with and that's what it's all about is the missouri statewide and north america now i'm again we can go back in that list you can come up with you can do what i'm about to do with anything like if you're in california try the california statewide if you want but in this case i'm just going to focus on these two talk groups north america it's a it's a big talk group it's all basically everybody in in the united states or actually north well in canada so i will start off with missouri so i'm going to type in missouri okay and that's a group call and it's dmr id is or it's taught group id is 3129 done all right let's do let's do north america so let's do north america and again these are alpha tags for these for a number and that's a group call and it is 93 and we learned that from that list all right so talk groups put in the talk group okay so we're doing that now all right we got that one done we've created our talk groups now and that that can get huge you can make that as many talk groups as you want put up i mean in fact you can go out and get some pre pre uh pre-done list of all these talk groups and import them into your radio but we're not going to go there right now because we want to learn the basics we are learning how to make a code plug okay so i've got four talk groups in my radio all right so now the next step is we want to create channels okay for this repeater so one of the things let me just share with you this is what okay got all this let's see that digital contact list we don't have those yet okay we're not gonna fool with that but we're gonna go up here to channels okay and this is where it gets interesting okay so i left clicked on number one and i now have all of this stuff to look at all right so this is where all of that information those key metrics where we have our frequency time slot and uh our contact done okay so the first channel we're gonna we're gonna make channels for every one of those talk groups so let's go ahead and do the disconnect so i'm going to call okay we this is where you want to assign an appropriate alpha tag we know we're going to talk on this kci repeater and we know we're going to talk on the disconnect so i'm going to create a channel i'm going to call it kci disconnect disc okay and i know that the received frequency of my radio is going to be the transmit frequency of the repeater okay so the repeater is transmitting on 444.4625 and tab down and it's going to i'm going to my radio is going to transmit on the repeater's receive frequency of 449.4625 that's very important okay you can get those backwards it can be confusing but you want to always make you want to in your radio you always flip-flop what the repeaters you know every you know you res you transmit on one repeater receives on that same frequency so they're backwards and you just need to keep keep that in mind okay the current channel type is a digital channel we'll leave the power at high the band was 12 and a half this tx permit always i've set mine up to always uh you can do channel free channel free means if the channel is free if there's nobody talking on it you can it will then allow for you otherwise it'll give you a bonk and won't let you but let's just for the sake of doing this code plug we'll make this always okay another item here is the dmr mode this is going to be repeater okay you want to make sure you check that the contact now this is where you're going to see the list of groups that we made so i'm going to click on this just so you can see okay so there's the contact list that we have available to us that's what i just made okay you can see over here the talk the tg disconnect is 4000 it's a group call if i over if i go over here and i click on that that left click that opens up that now you can see the parrot north america group call okay so we want the disconnect so we're going to make that okay now this is where we also look and see what the color code is we know that these guys want color code 4. this is really important this is where a lot of uh in my experience this is where a lot of people have problems it because it's all new to them but if you don't get the color code right no dice you don't you can't get in the repeater so it's extremely important to match the color code with the channel you're creating color code four is what they want and all these repeaters the system operator has assigned a color code to that channel and it's all arbitrary there's no rhyme or reason to any of it you just they say hey i want color code for okay everybody that gets on that repeater has got to use color code for and it's just like the pl tone that everybody you know knows about in in analog uh fm repeaters that we're using for uh you know all the good all the days that we're using repeater some type pl tone of 88.5 1072 114.8 what's the reason behind all that well there's some uh but really it's just it's an arbitrary selection so color code four is what they want then the next section uh for this is time slot one that's where they want us they want us on time slot one because that's where all the traffic that's not related to their other concerns goes so we're already on time slot one and all this other stuff encryption multiple sms we don't care about any of that analog we're not on analog so that's it that's all you have to do to make a channel for a dmr okay now i'm going to show you a quick and easy way to add more channels without having to rewrite the book so we're going to do a copy and we're going to do a paste we're going to do another copy i'm going to do a paste whoops did i lock oh so let's paste here well i wonder why okay maybe there's a bug in there let's copy that again there's a page okay and then can we paste it here again yep okay so we're going to go in because i didn't want to have to type in all those frequencies every time i want to just cut and paste because i know i'm going to talk on the same repeater but i'm just using two different talk grips so that's a quick tip and save you some time so we're going to go into this uh and all we have to do is change the the channel name which is what we know as the alpha tag so in this case we're going to do the parrots so i'm going to talk about kci parrot and that is the first one we're going to try and make contact with okay so i'm going to change my group i'm sorry my contact so now we're on the parrot still color code fours time slot one all good everything's fine high power digital everything's the same so all we want to do is change the alpha tag and the contact let's go in here and do this one this one's going to be let's go ahead and do missouri so this is going to be kci we'll talk at missouri okay and again go over here to the contact change it to missouri we know it's 3129 real simple color code 4 time slot 1 done and then let's go ahead and quickly do north america so we're going to talk kci and we'll just do n a for north america and put that in here talk group 93 color code 4 slot 1 all done all right okay so we have created our channels check all right now the next step is we want to create a zone got to have a zone it's a must no zone no no no work okay so up here you're gonna see on public channel and zone okay so we're gonna we're gonna go in here and create a zone okay now we're gonna call this the kci [Music] zone because that's the repeater that i'm talking on and we are going to put the channels in the zone you have to put your channels in a zone or this will not work so i just moved all those into a zone you got to do that that's a real simple step so that's step nine got that done okay we did we created the zone that was easy and we just put the channels in the zone and that's easy so now we want to write to the radio and we want to test it so this is where we find out if i know what i'm talking about okay so let's write to the radio we got a zone let's go by way of review we put the dmr id in the radio so everybody knows who i am we added some talk groups four of them we created four channels we create one zone we put the channels in the zone and now we're gonna write the radio okay so we're gonna go over here to program i'm gonna go right to radio okay right data to radio do you wish to continue yes okay digital contact list don't want to fool with that right now that that's another day but more importantly we want the other data okay so i'm on com3 it's working right data complete perfect all right copying data to the radio please wait do not power off booting please wait okay the splash screen comes up this is what you should see and we're going to go up here to zone oops let's see kci zone select switch to zone okay let's see i want to go into okay there we are kci i pre uh these okay let me just share with you what happened here and then i'm gonna real quick i don't like the fact that this display goes off every time i need it on all the time so i'm gonna go down here this little bonus content i'm gonna change my settings my my radio set and this thing's called the light time right now it's set for five seconds this thing goes off i want this thing to just stay on that way i don't have to deal with that anymore okay so that's that's a little bonus content show you how to do that okay and now i'm going to go back here okay i got the kci zone you can see my frequency and then i'm gonna change the channel two three they're all the same okay now you can tell um there's why am i not seeing any kind of uh channel names here all right i'm gonna jump back into cps and change that real quick because this is key because i don't know what they are i don't have that all that intelligence i just gave you we're not able to see so what we want to do is we want to go over here to optional settings on our cps and we want to go to power on okay and default startup channel okay we want starting okay kci zone zone is a channel okay we want that okay and then we want that okay let's see display okay this is where you change the name of we want to change some of this stuff so that we can see what's going on okay there's where it says five seconds i want to change that to always because if i write this again i'm gonna mess that up and it's gonna go back to so that's where you change this is where you can change some of the way the radio works uh without uh and it'll be permanent okay because every time you read and write let's say you make a change on the radio and then you read it or i'm sorry you write over it and then you got to go back to every you know where you were and it just becomes a kind of confusing so uh that's going to be always and i want to make sure i give you the actual channel number okay so let's just write this in let's rewrite that see if that does it i'll tell you that this radio this 878 it's a i mean i've been in radio for over 25 years and you know for the money this radio uh it's a it's got a lot of stuff i mean it's a it's a decent radio it's one of the best ones out there so i just rewrote it and it's got a lot of things that's going to keep you you know enthused with you know how to get this thing customized for you okay so i didn't i didn't change that okay so i'm going to see where it says channel okay there's the disconnect whoops the pair okay that's what i want there's the channel name there's the north america okay so it's going to the zone and then it reverts and shows you the actual talk group there we go that's what i was looking for so that's the disconnect number two is the zone that's the parrot and this is every time i hit the the volume knob it okay and then there's the uh north america okay good and it's staying lit up all the time which is what i want to okay so i'm on channel two which is as we saw is the parrot so i'm going to remove this programming cable and keep in mind uh if you don't remove the programming cable you you won't be able to hear anything the audio won't come out the speaker so um this repeater is located uh north of me and what i'm going to do is i'm going to actually i'm going to there's a window over here and i have because of being i've done this before i'm and have a higher probability of getting into this repeater and and keep in mind you want if you don't get into the repeater right away i would suggest just moving someplace out go outside just make sure you're not dealing with an obstruction so we're going to go over here to this r this window and i'm going to uh just see if i can hit the parrot kc0qvt okay let's try it again kc0qvt okay why it didn't do it the first time i don't know but you heard it i got into the repeater uh which is cool so that me i just you know all that stuff that i just showed you uh it works so let me do it one more time i'm transmitting at high power which is about 5 watts okay the repeater is probably somewhere on the order of maybe 10 miles away and i'm hitting it right here in smithville missouri kc0qvt jc 0qvt cool okay so i know i hit the repeater now let's try and see if okay i'm going to come over well rather than burden the camera i'm going to change the uh talk group here to missouri okay which i know is channel three okay so i'm gonna you know by way of demonstrating demonstration into educate i'm going to key into the this repeater and bring up missouri statewide this kc 0qvt monitoring missouri statewide anybody copy my cuso now hopefully somebody is listening if not we can try north america now this is the challenge you're going to have when you try these various talk groups uh i mean we're hoping we're going where the fish are biting so if you don't find anybody on your statewide talk group you can go to another one okay and that's what i'm trying to do right now okay i'm gonna try one more time kc0qvt anybody copy okay nobody's home which is not surprising i mean i it's chances of somebody being on there i mean you've got to have people monitoring that okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go over here to the disconnect which is channel 1 and i'm going to free up the repeater okay and all you have to do is just basically ptt and it should say uh disconnect i think it will come back and tell me it should tell you hang on let's try it again it's a private not linked let's let me real quick let me just make sure i didn't [Music] okay okay you heard that said not linked that means i i freed up the repeater okay so now let's try north america now there's a high chance of uh talking to somebody on this one kc0qvt monitoring north america anybody copy for radio check well i want you guys to hear this kc0qvt monitoring north america anybody copy for radio check over okay okay i i can put another talk group in here that i know will probably light it up i just didn't want to it's called worldwide it's a talk group that's pretty pretty busy uh we we got time i can put one put that in let's just add one more talk group guys let's add one more talk group and if somebody chimes in it'll it'll unmute but let me put let me let me show you how to quickly add a talk group we'll go out here and we'll add we'll go all the way to the top and worldwide is 91 okay and and i will use the resource so we'll go ahead here to talk group five we'll put in worldwide it's a group call talk group 91 whoops 91. okay we're going to create a channel we'll cut and paste we'll copy we'll paste we're going to add a channel here kciw okay change the uh there to worldwide time slot one everything's the same okay and then we're going to add it to the zone just going back through the steps so i got this kci zone and we're going to go into there and click ok hook up my programming cable all right let's program it up right to radio we're going fishing all right welcome any tones everything's all good okay and i am going to well let's do the disconnect first real quick i think this is disconnect channel one yep okay that should be good it should disconnect okay it did over here is not i don't get good reception okay there's channel five that's what i just added okay so i'm going to go over here and key up on worldwide now let's just let's just do the parrot real quick again kc0qvt okay kind of digital there okay so we're on channel five okay this is the worldwide kc zero qvt monitoring worldwide kc0qvt monitoring worldwide anybody copy i don't know if they block worldwide or not it's pretty busy repeater or bitty bitty pretty busy talk group okay it's almost one hour huh i'm not getting anybody okay well in the interest of time i this is the steps that i showed you and i'm sorry i i'm not getting uh anybody to come back to me which is frustrating um and i'm not certain why but i'm pretty confident i got into the repeater with the parrot so i know for a fact that i hit the repeater and i'm actually going out on the network um there is ways when this happens you're kind of like what's going on why am i not you know what what's happening nobody's responding okay well i know i got to repeaters so what do you do in this case i mean i'm kind of confused i thought you know i'd hear somebody so what you can do which is an interesting tool here is you can go to the brandmeister dashboard here and you can look at the what's called the last herd okay and this is just gonna just barrage you with all the activity that's being that's happening on the network okay and you can see if you're if you're getting out and yeah i'm sorry i want to make sure you guys see that you can go out to uh we want we want to be on missouri let's try okay so you can see here all this activity that's taken place on bran meister you know in a in a brief in the last period of time and okay and it's it's it's busy so it's um it does it may i don't know clog up your repeater or your computer rather okay yeah let's see so somebody there is keying up with uh let's just see if it sees him so what i can do is i can actually search here and i'll actually look for my call sign i want to go down here to search yeah it's a it's a pretty active website so it might not respond yeah it's still still loading up stuff that's the risk you run with with this kind of thing okay so we're going to wait it's just constantly just you got to have good ethernet good fast computer to catch all this stuff and it eventually it it it happens so we're going to try to see hopefully that'll come in it might take a bit of time yeah it's you got that try 31515 ralph okay i could do that let's see what what uh 3-1 i can yeah i can try to talk to somebody let's see let me look that up 3-1 yeah ty okay uh ralph schultz says drive31515 i'm listening uh he's november 6 golf victor golf let's do it why not if you guys want to hang around i'll i'll throw in uh i'll throw this in and see if we can talk to ralph oops oh push yeah i'm really really glad to see that okay so let's do that um okay so i'm going to copy well let's listen let's add him as a talk group okay so we want to this let's see what is he called he's tidewater virginia so let's do that tied tidewater va where am i is that all the room i got i thought i had more okay todd that's a group call and he's three one what is he three one five one five three one five one five okay let's do that all right three one five one five okay so we want to create a channel over here okay so this is kci let's just call it tidewater and north america oh it's a group call color code four time one okay we should be good to go so i'm gonna add him as channel 6. alright so i'm going to write this to the radio okay so it's let's see if november 6. golf victor golf is on the air okay so here let me just uh well you already moved over okay uh channel six let me hit the let me hit the disconnect all right i just disconnected should tell me not linked all right so i freed up the repeater now i'm going to go over here to channel 6. you know what i just uh i made the the uh the cardinals committed the cardinal sin here i forgot to add this channel to the zone because i'm in a hurry and without that you do not see that channel so major mistake so if you do that you just you just saw me make a rookie mistake all right why is that i don't know what that other there's a bug in this code i don't know about this k that's that zone 2 shouldn't be in there i don't know i deleted everything so anyway let's put that we have to add tied water to the deal and i don't know that's that's left over from a while back there might be an issue with their software okay so i've added the zone or added the channel to the zone yep so don't forget the zone that's right ralph forgot the zone all right okay because i couldn't see channel six on my radio all right let's see if we can hit ralph here real quick going over here to the window kc zero qvt monitoring tidewater virginia you copy ralph and why am i not unmuting he's he's talking why is it not unmutant okay i don't know okay let's i'm going to put it on digital monitor sorry about that there we go all right okay let me try that again channel uh six kc 0qvt you copy ralph this is november 6th golf victor golf copy loud and clear on and six tv okay okay here's what here's what i just would okay let me go over here okay stand by ralph uh copy it loud and clear and i want to speak to the group about what just happened there uh this kc zero qvt standby okay here i'm going to show you what what here can you kick over to the okay what what's interesting and here's what's going on and i am kind of puzzled here what happened okay and i i when i got what i did was i uh not to get you too terribly involved i've turned on what's called digital monitoring i saw that there was activity by looking at my uh by looking at my my signal strength indicator i saw that there was activity okay and i knew he some of there was activity then he i could see that he tried to get back to me and so what i i noticed you get this intelligence underneath the radio and it was coming back on time slot two and which is puzzling to me because i'm on slot one and the only way i know this is because i had digital monitoring on okay and i'm not going to get into the details on that but basically it's a way you can see up here in the in the upper left upper left corner you're going to see your your antenna your power indicator which is high power and then you're going to see this red speaker with two bars and i turned on double time slot monitoring okay so i'm gonna just real quick try to see if i can show you this i don't know if i can get in in this location in the room but i'm gonna see if i can hit ralph again so that you can see this intelligence come come up below the screen kc0qvt ralph you copy okay i may not be able to show this to you but anyway it was saying it's time slot 2 so that's why i wasn't hearing anything because i'm on time slot 1 and i have no idea why that repeater is responding to me on time slot 2. it might be that time i don't know if it's got some kind of rewriting but i'm going to come over here and i'll finish up my qso with ralph this kc zero qvt uh monitoring tidewater virginia how you doing uh ralph i'm having fun watching this for on n6gbg n6g well i'll make sure i get you a qsl card my friend i do appreciate you uh attending and monitoring this um as you can see it's got its challenges and uh you know we're all live and and we're just having a great time here just doing uh doing dmr and having fun with amateur radio hey i appreciate the the qso i'm going to get back to it and i do appreciate the comeback thank you so much my friend see if he responds here we go [Music] i didn't catch that ralph what'd you say with the uh uh signal strength you know on the side of this wall but anyway i'm gonna wrap up this uh this live stream um so anyway you've got a a uh uh something that you can do to say hey what's going on i see this repeater it looks like i'm i'm seeing signal but i don't it's not my radio is not unmuting um and so you can turn on that digital monitoring and so my suggestion would be like as far as homework what is digital monitoring so uh digital monitoring allows for you to monitor all the traffic on your repeater uh and it it so you're not dealing with uh specific talk group numbers anyway uh if you guys still have time i know we're running an hour and 15 minutes i do appreciate you being here i think it's great that you're willing to spend your time with me i know your time's valuable i'm willing to ask some questions but you know or answer some questions and you can see that uh you know this is the key work around if you have a problem work around it you know this keep going uh you've got folks that willing to help you we're here to help you so anyway i'm gonna i've got the screen over here and i can see that there might be some questions i know you guys have been chiming in got some folks from toronto new hampshire connecticut david he's david torkelson just called you on 93. i'll hear that um [Music] stephen knight yeah that's work around the situation talking to a sure thing absolutely carson uh whiskey whiskey quebec one i don't i can't scroll that up a little bit more if you could oh india whiskey quebec one india nice kilo india six sierra sierra echo sacramento but anyway this this content is available uh can we listen to vj uh asks uh can we listen to a local repeater in the same mode i'm not exactly i'm not exactly sure what you're talking about same mode you've got dmr you've got analog so you have to be in agreement with the mode that you're going to want to talk on so ron henry kilo bravo 9 zulu bravo milwaukee oh vj's from michigan kilo echo 8 november victor david or delta uh stephen knight earlier just wanted to thank you for helping them understand the jargon and terminology yeah yeah there's a lot of jargon a lot of new terminology you guys are just getting into it this is uh this is what you do but we did we did we did create a code plug from scratch okay and one of the challenges is i'm talking on a repeater that's managed by other people and sometimes i don't know how they're running their railroad okay but i'm trying okay you're gonna see people on the dmr mark network you're gonna have folks on the tgif network uh and i want you guys to know this uh you know just as well um i'm in the i'm on this journey with you as well so i've been you know i i'm you know i've done engineering you know for a lot of years you're always encountering problems but you know the key is you don't give up you don't give up you just keep you keep trudging through and i mean i think that's uh you know why we're amateur radio folks we want to continue to learn we want to continue to grow uh we don't know everything and you know being you know we just don't know everybody's on this journey at some level and it's great to see so many people getting into the game and anyway we've got a a facebook group page i invite you to join that uh we have a lot of folks on there willing to answer your questions i'm on there occasionally we're adding a couple hundred people a week to that and we've got a youtube channel we want to invite you to uh subscribe to uh there's a lot of content we put out there as well and you know there's a lot of information out there don't don't be afraid to do a google search you know but again this is the start of a lot of y'all's journey you know you've got these these uh six steps you know that you need to follow got this content and also this this content will be available uh to you guys and and we're doing this again because there's so many new people getting into the to the game but with that i'm gonna i think i've gone on long enough i do appreciate you being here your time is you know we love it we love that you're willing to spend time with us with that i'll say a big seven three to everybody and have a great st patrick's day uh st patrick was the patron saint of engineering at least that's what i was told when i went to university so anyway have a great day enjoy your family and friends and enjoy being on the radio with dmr and we're going to end this qso bridgecom systems headquarters 7-3

Channel: BridgeCom Systems, Inc

Views: 82,348

Keywords: Amateur, radio, how to connect to a repeater, dmr repeater, how to program a dmr radio, dmr for beginners, ham, bridgecom, systems, how to, can i, should i, how do i, how do you

Id: 09YJ0eHRkc8

Length: 82min 20sec (4940 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021