When I’ve got my licence I’m planning on getting an AnyTone AT-D878UVII PLUS. It uses the digital mode called DMR1.

Why do I use this digital mode and not one of the other popular modes (C4FM, D-Star)? Simply, because this is the “most free and open source” mode I could find.2 It is not entirely free, since it uses the proprietary AMBE+2 vocoder. Hopefully a free vocoder will succeed AMBE+2. Maybe Codec2.

To properly use a digital transceiver it has to be configured with a codeplug3. To program a DMR radio you need a software to distribute the codeplug. Sadly there are not many tools to do so, if you are using Linux.

Luckily I found qdmr, that is managed by Hannes Matuschek (DM3MAT).

Installation

So, how do you get this thing going?

Hannes provides how to’s for a large amount of systems (including building steps) over on https://dm3mat.darc.de/qdmr/install.html.

First I cloned the git repository (it was not supported by my package manager) and switched to the latest Version (in my case 0.10.0):

git clone https://github.com/hmatuschek/qdmr
cd qdmr
git checkout v0.10.0

Don’t bother about the notice about being in detatched HEAD, since we won’t be changing anything.

Then I simply followed the building steps of Hannes. They worked like a charm!

Notes:

  • The dependencies took roughly 120MB of my hard disk space.
  • Building does take some time!
  • I needed to add my user to the dialout group

First run

Since I don’t have a DMR radio, I just fired up qdmr and looked at it. The terminal output informed me, of the missing repeater lists, user lists and talk groups and thus loaded some. The interface itself seems nice. I just noticed, that the button New with wizard... doesn’t do anything. Maybe this changes as soon as a device is connected. No Messages are printed in the output, when I click the button though.

Next steps

  1. Buy a transceiver
  2. Find a codeplug, that can be used as base or
  3. Build your own codeplug.

Changelog:

  • 2022-03-27: added link to “building your codeplug with qdmr”

Footnotes:

  1. for more info on the modes refere to my Ham-Dictionary. ↩

  2. If you know a really free (popular) digital mode, please send me an email! ↩

  3. A codeplug is nothing more, than a config file. ↩