DMR activity

I had not played with my DMR radios and hotspots for almost 2 years, just too busy to update them again, reprogramming codeplugs to keep up with changes in the local VK networks. Having to work from home, I can get to do some tinkering while not having to travel each day, it was only from monitoring local FM repeaters whilst working at home, that I heard a few other people were configuring and testing their DMR radios and hotspots, so I got my gear out of the cupboard and turned it all, did some searches to check on local talkgroups, firmware and software updates, etc.

1st stop, was my SharkRF OpenSPOT1 hotspot, upgraded the firmware from 1.1-0117 to 1.1-0141 made some configuration changes and it was soon ready.

2nd stop my JumboSpot MMDVM hotspot, first upgrade the Pi-Star dashboard from 20180502 to 20200503, I do need to do the Pi-Star firmware  as it currently a few years behind on 3.4.12, firstly will go to 3.4.17 and then try building another SD card so I can test ver 4 of Pi-Star.

3rd stop was my Radiodity GD-77 it had Firmware 3.00.06, DSP HRC6000 v1.2 and was using CPS 3.1.1. as I realised later it was the wrong CPS, anyway, upgraded to Firmware 4.2.8 (2019-12-4) and CPS 3.1.9 , first exporting the Contacts and Channels to .csv so that I could import under the new CPS, this all went fine, new codeplug created, loaded, all looked fine, except after a while I realised it not decoding any received stations, however, analogue FM worked fine. Did some reading of discussions, to see how to clear memory, tried that, did not help, only showed that it wiped new codeplug, but old codeplug was still in memory. Forums gave clue that memory mapping not the same, but overlapped from 3.x to 4.x and suggested need to properly clear memory, by reverting to old firmware v 2.63, because v3.06 had bug of wiping internal TX power settings, if I was to do the Memory Reset. I had all versions of firmware from 3.0.6 and above, but I could not trust that if I loaded another version ie. 3.1.6, 3.1.8, 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 that they would be capable of clearing memory without the TX power bug seen in 3.0.6. (in other words, I did not want to brick my TX power internal setup)
The forums suggested safest and guaranteed method was rollback to firmware v2.63, which I did and I then was able to clear the memory of my original codeplug. The older v2.6.3 firmware actually does clear everything in memory, it displays an extra message I think it said Factory Initiliase.  Then I upgraded firmware to 4.2.8, loaded my new codeplug created under CPS 3.1.9 and now it all works perfectly.

Last, was upgrade my TYT MD-380, it had MCU F/W D0003.020  and CPS v01.27 HW 1.00 after some reading of forums I see there are later version of the MD-380 which they refer to as the new vocoder, so my unit was the old vocoder which has the most recent firmware, so my issue here was I was using the wrong CPS, it should be 1.32 .  I found you really need to have the correct matching CPS against the firmware version being used. I updated and save my existing codeplug using the correct CPS version 1.32 now this MD-380 doing the correct behaviour.

In summary,  OpenSpot is on Brandmeister network, my MMDVM on the VK-DMR network (formerly DMR-MARC)  and it looks like the operators of VKDMR have settled down to defined set of TG's instead of this constant changing of TG's every week trying to keep up with the whingers.

As far as Brandmeister is concerned, slowly discovering what TG's are there, seems to be a whole suite of different gateways operating in various multimode combinations for NXDN, P25, D-Star and YSF/WIRES-X and monitoring these gateway/reflectors I see lots of people experimenting, which is good. I even had a contact with VK2JDS on P25, using my DMR hheld via the VK3GWY multimode gateway.
Discovered there is a new DMR simplex, it is now 439.200 MHz TG99 and 145.650 TG99

The unfortunate discovery was some hotspot operators running their hotspots in totally wrong parts of the band,  one was on 432.000 right on the edge EME section, (in fact they are in breach of their license)  the other was on 432.125MHz  smack in the weak signal SSB section of 70cm.  Some people just got no idea of WTF they doing. They really need to read the WIA Bandplan.