FVARC Flathead Valley Amateur Radio Club

For our April 20 Flathead Valley Amateur Radio Club meeting I will be giving a presentation on DMR, a digital voice technology which has become quite popular within the ham radio community. The presentation will discuss the basics of DMR technology, the interconnection of DMR repeaters and reflectors over the Internet, and a review of some of the DMR radios available and their pricing. You will likely be surprised at the low price tag of some of the DMR offerings out there.

DMR is a great way for those with Technician Class licenses to expand their capabilities from being limited to using local repeaters to talking to other hams around the world via DMR’s massive network of interconnected repeaters and reflectors which cover the globe.

At our May 18 meeting, I’ll introduce “hotspots”. These are inexpensive devices ($80 on up) which act like little repeaters (typically low power in the 10-40mw range) and, using your home’s WiFi network, along with the appropriate handheld, enable you to talk to folks around the world using Yaesu’s System Fusion network, Icom’s D-Star, DMR and even P25. The presentation will include a demo of a few of the popular hotspots and how to acquire and setup your own.

For those wishing to use DMR, we have a DMR repeater in Bigfork, owned and operated by Neal Garbenis (NE7AL); so, it’s easy to get onto DMR once you get a handheld or mobile/base capable of DMR. You can find the repeater’s details on our club website.

This announcement was emailed to the club's current roster. If you did not receive that email and would like to receive future club email, please send me your email address using the "Contact" tab.

73,

Rick Fletcher, W7YP