Just got a DV-MEGA single band 70cm Raspberry Pi hat because I wanted to have a fiddle with a hotspot for the MD380. I can get into three (sometimes four) DV repeaters from here but I do like to play with tech. This little board plugs into the Pi’s GPIO connector. I already had a spare Pi 3 from an abandoned PVR project and a PoE power unit so why not. The board will take an SMA arial directly but mine has a dummy load screwed in instead.
I’m using Andy Taylor’s Pi-Star package from http://www.pistar.uk/ – from there one can download a complete image for various boards including the Pi which, when imaged onto an SD card results in a Pi which boots up headless and presents a really nice web interface from which all configuration and monitoring can be carried out.
And it works really well. It is a doddle to set up and configure, especially given an instructional video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5G4gYDdJeQ
Anyway, it also made me reconfigure the MD380 as the codeplug I had made previously was a little disorganised. I now have all four local repeaters set for all the useful talk groups in two zones each (the radio can only have 16 channels each, awkwardly), including a zone for the simplex channels which I had forgotten (!) and a separate zone for my hot spot, that one with the tx power set to low. The channel is set to colour 1, a lot of people seem to use 438MHz as the frequency (NB both tx and rx), and TG9. The slot does not matter as it’s simplex.
Connecting to a talk group is straightforward on the MD380. Menu -> Contacts -> Manual Dial and then enter the TG number e.g. 4400 for the UK wide one and press the PTT. You should hear a voice telling you that you are connected. Use 9990 for the parrot, and 4000 to disconnect. QED.