DMR relaunched

I dug my poor dusty MD380 out yesterday and charged it up. For a while now I have had Fusion and POCSAG on the pi-star but I rarely use the FT2D and when I do it's only for APRS. So I thought why not get DMR back into the pi-star. I have a dual DVMEGA HAT with pi-star set to duplex from when I was fiddling with the new HAT.

Anyway, since I last used the MD380 I changed the rx and tx frequencies in pi-star to the 'designated' hotspot frequencies so the MD380 needed reprogramming.

That's where it all started to go south...

First off, since I rebuilt the Windows PC I did not, for some reason copy across the MD380 programming software. Ok, found it on the web and installed it. Can it see the TYT programming lead? Nah. This particular lead is basically a wire, it does not have a chip built in apparently and so needs a specific driver. Oh yes, Windows will see the lead and knows what the device is but has no clue about the driver.

Ok. Found a driver. Installed it - apparently - it does not give an error but the rapidly disappearing screen on installation did not fill me with confidence. And no, it doesn't work.

Tried another programming software suite called editcp (https://www.farnsworth.org/dale/codeplug/editcp/) in case that included the driver. Nope. The disk that came with the MD380, which took some searching as it is one of those small CDs and has nothing at all written on to indicate it is from TYT, also has the driver but it would not install either.

Right. Over to Linux. It saw the device and lsusb shows a reasonable text string. The same editcp software has a Linux version. And, typical of Linux it just works. It read the radio, allowed me change the frequencies and programmed the radio again, no issues (*). I did have to remember just how to set up the codeplug as I wanted to use both TS1 and TS2... that took a bit of head scratching as it's been years since I fiddled with this. But a couple of useful websites (there are many others) helped sort my brain out and I now have pi-star and the MD380 set up for TS1 and TS2 with different talkgroups on each via the Brandmeister self service.

(* OK I'll admit it took me five attempts to program the frequencies as I kept reading it wrong! FOUR times entered wrong before I got it typed in correctly)