DMR, DV4mini and the Raspberry Pi

I have recently been experimenting with Amateur Radio DMR, using a Connect Systems 700 handheld and a DV4mini USB dongle.

One of the cool things about the DV4mini dongle is that it can give access to the Brandmeister DMR network where there are no physical repeaters in range which is good, as in all of Northern Ireland, at the time of writing, there are only 2 operational repeaters on the Phoenix network and another one licensed but not yet operational, with an announcement on the network not yet released.

The DV4mini is an amazing piece of kit, and with the DV4MF2 dashboard allows the use of many of the same features as available on repeaters, including reflectors and Extended Routing. Access to Talk Slot 1 is also in the works. Once the frequency correction is set, it is literally a Plug-n-Play solution.

As someone who uses Linux for a lot of his computers, it was interesting that the software will run on Linux through the Mono framework, which essentially emulates a Windows environment in which the .exe file can run. That's not a completely correct statement, but close enough for this case. This means that the software can run on a Raspberry Pi, essentially giving you the option to run the DV4mini permanently online at little cost in terms of power or hardware. There are some great tutorials around on how to get this working with 3.5" TFT screens and VNC etc. but I wanted to take this in a slightly different direction. I have a number of original Pi Bs, with the 256MB RAM, as well as a few Pi Zeros, and I though it would be useful to use them to run completely headless, without even running the dashboard. They don't really have enough grunto to run Mono and the dashboard without issues, but if all they had to do was interface the USB dongle to the network, they should be easily capable of that.

So my experimenting started, and what follows in the next few blog posts is a record of some of the ideas I've tried, along with how well they worked.

CQ de MI0PYN

Hi there!

If you've stumbled across this, you still have time to back away slowly, turn around and escape unharmed.

This blog is essentially a way for me to document some of my stumblings amongst the various aspects of ham radio, and especially where it interacts with my other hobbies of computer networking and Linux.

Expect to read about DMR, digimodes, homebrew repeaters and other gear.

If you're not into any of that, you'll probably have died of boredom already, but if you are interested in it, and you find anything in these pages helpful, let me know.

Best 73,
Stefan
MI0PYN