I am embarrassed that a year ago I promised to write more here on my blog.  As you can see, I haven’t.  So I think it’s time to write about something interesting.

For the last year or so, I have become interested in the growth of DMR in the Ham radio world.  DMR, simply put, is a digital voice technology that works over FM radios and gives extremely high quality audio output.  It’s one of several competing standards in ham radio right now, but is expanding rapidly due to the availability of low cost radios to work with it.

I became interested in building repeaters a while back and was first involved in All-Star Link.  As the technologies became more and more available to folks like me with “not a lot” of money, I decided that I was going to build and deploy a DMR repeater.  I’ve talked up the tech with my ham buddies for a while now, convincing several of them to purchase their own DMR radios.  And we’ve been developing a DMR repeater that we’d going to deploy (install) here in the next week or two.

As with most things with me, this has been a process of intense learning.  Learning how to configure repeaters, learning the basics of DMR, learning some of the more obscure things that can trip one up in the building of one.  Yes, I have been learning a LOT!  As normal, my initial estimate of the time it would take to get a working repeater was exceeded by about 500%!

Anyway, here we are today, with a working repeater that is almost ready to be put into place.  I must say my excitement is building again.  It’s been a long and somewhat painful road (I’d say not unlike having a baby, but I’m sure I’d get slapped down for saying that, so I won’t! LOL)

For those of you who might be interested, this repeater will be installed at the Fidelity Communications building in downtown Sullivan MO.  Considering the height of the antenna there, we think the repeater should have good range.  Pertinent technical details are as follows:

  • Repeater Output Frequency – 444.600
  • Repeater Input Frequency – 449.600
  • Color Code – 2
  • TS 1 Static Talk Groups  – none specified at this time
  • TS 2 Static Talk Groups – BYRG (31201)

This is an open repeater and is available for general public use.  If you have problems, please feel free to contact me.  Please be gentle though.  This is our first attempt at this! 😀

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