There are a couple of methods of updating a Pi-Star based MMDVM hotspot, one upgrades Pi-Star itself and the other method does a full operating system update as well as Pi-Star. The Pi itself automatically runs a process overnight that updates the host file and various other things but this is how to do a […]
How to enable cross band repeater mode and extended transmit on the Icom ID-5100E
With all the hotspots I have in the house for various modes, I decided to do something about the RF. They all run very low power but they’re only for me to use and I didn’t want the RF escaping the house. I bought a few tiny little dummy loads from eBay and replaced the […]
Over the last four or five years I’ve been a regular user of two digital voice modes, D-STAR and DMR. I don’t particularly like to use them to work ‘DX’ but they both have their advantages regarding linking repeaters together and allowing me to keep in touch with people when I’m away from home. Both […]
I bought myself a new handheld at the Newark rally earlier this year, an Anytone AT-D878UV to use on DMR. When I went on holiday in October, I took a couple of copies of RadCom with me and in one of them there was a review of my handheld. The author mentioned that he’d used […]
About a year ago I changed my car and it’s taken a while to get around to fitting the radio into it. I’ve missed having a wireless in the car and recently resorted to keeping a handheld in the glove box so at least I could natter on the local repeater while driving around town. […]
I’ve written a couple of times in the past about various digital voice modes and if I’m honest, I’ve been quite scathing of them. I make no secret of the fact that I’m very happy to use repeaters for local natter but don’t like the idea of linking remote repeaters together via the internet to […]
An interesting subject came up on our 70cms voice repeater earlier today following an incident on a local DMR box yesterday and it got me thinking. There are a lot of 70cms repeaters in the UK with input frequencies between 430 MHz and 431 MHz and many people don’t realise that our licence only allows […]
I’m a happy owner of two Icom ID-5100 radios, one is mounted in the car and I use the other one in the shack on low power for working the local repeaters. It doesn’t get much use but I’m monitoring GB3CL and GB7TE most of the time. About the only thing which I don’t like about this […]
Back in March 2011 I wrote about three different modes of communications, EchoLink, D-STAR and QSONet. In that piece, I discounted all of them and although I said that D-STAR was the one which most interested me, I wasn’t planning on using it due to a lack of any D-STAR repeaters nearby. Fast forward to earlier […]
