I have long been interested in radio ever since being introduced to the hobby way back in my teens. I was first shown a working amateur radio station back in 1990. I owned my first world band radio shortly after leaving school in 1991, built a working transmitter in 1992 and had my first VHF/UHF scanning receiver in 1993. I later progressed through citizens' band radio but quickly became dissillusioned with the toilet mouths, mike keyers and music players anot to mention those who thought they owned the airwaves. This hastened my progress towards taking my amateur radio exam, gaining my licence in 1995. The rest as they say is history.
Scanning an Introduction
A comprehensive guide to radio scanning. It is currently available in either Adobe Acrobat portable document (PDF) format or as an XPS (.xps) file. Enjoy but let me know what you think.
Radio programming by PC example. This shows how quick and versatile it is compared to programming by hand. The IC-R5 is used here; however many radios can be programmed this way nowadays. Very fortunate as 1000 memory channels or more are standard in all but the cheapest entry level scanning receivers. Saves days of time as well as repetative strain injury when programming by hand. Best results are obtained by saving the file first (right-click and select 'save as' on a PC). Origional recording made using Camtasia Studio.
An introduction to decoding MPT1327 trunked system control channels using Trunkview. Trunkview can also control some radios (such as the IC-R20) to follow calls on MPT1327 systems.
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G7VDI goes digital in 2016: I am so far active on the UK DMR Phoenix network, and the Brandmeister network via DV4mini running on a Raspberry PI Computer; shown below:
Digital Mobile Radio - the latest addition to my hobby:
I have spent some years 'meaning' to get active on a digital mode on VHF or UHF. Weighing up the three main options (DMR - Digital Mobile Radio, Icom's D-Star or Yaesu's Fusion), I
opted for DMR since this would give the best value (in terms of price and the level of activity found using my brand new AOR AR-DV1). DMR also is an open standard, meaning that you
have both competitive pricing and a wide choice of equipment to choose from. As reviewed above, my first DMR radio is the Hytera PD-365. In due course I will
be writing about my experiences with DMR. It has to be remembered that it is chiefly intended for business usage, rather than amateur radio, so there are a
number of shortcomings from the Amateur Radio perspective (one example being the lack of 'in the field' programmability; i.e. needing a PC to program channels).
All in all, my experiences to date have been 95% positive, I am pleased to report.
Since all but two UK DMR repeaters at time of writing are on 70cm (the two 2 metre units being far from my QTH) 70cm was the way to go. Remember, DMR is intended for business use and business users
would not need dual band equipment, so none is available, sorry to say.
DMR is by no means a substitute for HF - for starters it requires infrastructure to provide long distance communications, so not the beast communications choice following a natural
disaster (one such example being the Tsunami which hit Southeast Asia on boxing day 2004). But it does allow global communication for those who cannot easily get onto HF, or for easy
mobile usage.
My current project is a DMR hotspot based on a 'Raspberry PI' (who was smoking what when they decided on the name!) computer, which will in future also be utilised as a
hotspot for D-Star and/or Fusion. I am on a tight budget, so my hobby has to expand at a rate I can afford. This running headless (being managed entirely remotely using SSH for a console login or RDP for a GUI login).
Amateur radio digital network monitors: I decided to embed the live monitor panels since I have yet to find a site where all are made available in the same place. DMR is so far the only embeded mode; I may be adding monitors for D-Star or System Fusion later - this is harder to accomplish since they do not rely on a C-Bridge for linking as is the case with DMR.
Below is live data from the UK live Monitor Courtesy of the Phoenix UK Network Monitor. This data is updated in real-time from the UK C-Bridge which links the UK DMR repeaters
into the remainder of the network. This information is also used by the excellent 'DMR Tool' app: by Matt Millar which is available for both IPhone and
Samsung.
See Dstar Comms website for more information regarding DMR Tool and their other products.
UK/Europe Phoenix Amateur Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) Network - Live Monitor (Times are UTC, 1 hour behind British Summer Time):
Worldwide NXDN monitor
Brandmeister Amateur Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) Network - Live Monitor (Times are UTC, 1 hour behind British Summer Time):
