With DMR slowly getting off of the ground here in the metro, local operators are picking up HTs and mobiles. Out of the box, a DMR radio is pretty much useless until it's programmed, and your options for programming it from the front panel are fairly limited. Fortunately, a few local operators have created "codeplugs" for the Minnesota DMR system, and you can program your radio with an appropriate codeplug to get on the air in minutes. These codeplugs are available from the Doer Co-op here.
A "codeplug" is simply a programming file that provides the radio with information that it needs to operate. You may have saved a copy of your analogue HT's program using CHIRP or the manufacturer's software. This would be the equivalent of a DMR codeplug, and someone else could take your analogue HT's program and load it on their analogue HT to save the trouble of entering all of that information (repeater frequencies and PL tones, etc).
A lot of the areas in which DMR repeaters operate have codeplugs available for their repeater, or even state-wide network. Programming a DMR radio is substantially more complex than programming an analogue radio, and a codeplug is a way to eliminate that barrier. Before you can use the codeplug, you have to get a DMR ID, and enter that ID number into the codeplug under the "Settings" area of the file. Then you just load the codeplug into the radio, and you're good to go.
These codeplugs are really just raw material, however. You'll probably want to modify them to your own tastes. In the case of an analogue program, you might want to re-arrange the order of repeaters, remove a particular repeater from scans, add VOX or DTMF tones, etc. You can do this on a DMR radio, too, and I'm going to explain how in another post.
Just a few things need to be made clear before we do that, though.
First, you need the programming software for your particular radio. Radios made by different manufacturers -- and even different models made by the same manufacturer -- use different software, and they aren't compatible with each other. The software for the TYT MD-380 is virtually identical (yet incompatible) with the software for the Connect Systems CS-700, and I've already got a working codeplug for the CS-700. So that's what I'll use as an example in the next post. Be aware that Motorola programming software requires an expensive license. All of the other manufacturers have free software available.
Second, It's important to understand things like channels, scan lists, and zones on DMR, as they don't have solid equivalents to analogue. On an analogue radio, a channel is pretty straightforward. It's there on your radio available to use once it's programmed in.
On DMR rigs, though, a channel is really just the information the radio needs to operate on a talk-group or analogue repeater. You can have hundreds of channels programmed in to your radio and not be able to access any of them unless they are assigned to zones.
A zone is a group of channels (up to 16) that can be accessed from your front-panel. You choose which channels you want in a zone, and create multiple zones and switch between them. For example, you could have several DMR talk-groups in one zone, and mix a few of your favourite analogue repeaters in to fill it out and make it easier to access them. You could have another zone devoted to DMR TAC (repeater-to-repeater) talk-groups, and a third zone for just regional talk-groups. It's very flexible, but you have to know how to modify the code-plug to shape the radio to your individual uses.
A scan list is a group of channels that you scan at one time. You can assign one scan list to each channel. For example, if you are on the "Local 2" talk-group (TG), you can set your radio to scan "North America", "Midwest Regional", etc. and even analogue repeaters. If you are on TAC 310, you can set it so that you only scan other TAC TGs. You can also, of course, just use one scan list for everything. It's not uncommon for operators be be dissatisfied with the scan lists in a generic codeplug, and it's impossible for the authors of these generic codeplugs to anticipate exactly what you'd prefer.
Zones and scan lists are the things that most often need to be modified, and modifying scan lists can involve editing the channels. It's important that you have some basic understanding as to what you are changing when you modify a code plug in order to make it do exactly what you are trying to achieve.
The next post will give you the specifics of how to make these simple changes.
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