Brandmeister DMR 2021 : A year-in-review

2021 has been a great year at Brandmeister DMR. The development team once again spoiled the DMR Amateur Radio community with many great features. Let’s review the most significant ones:

A new hoseline on steroids – QSOs on Brandmeister DMR talkgroups can be heard using a web browser on virtually any device, using the brand new Hoseline with improved audio, volume normalizing, multiple talkgroups listening, instant play, and many other features described in detail in this article.

Enhanced repeaters coverage plots – The coverage plots are more precise than they used to, and are updated minutes after making a change in repeater’s data.

Users and Repeaters Self Service– The days of the default “passw0rd” for hotspots and repeaters are over. The registration process on Brandmeister ensures that ham’s IDs are protected, and the traffic is not disturbed by rogue devices or gateways. Most new users are now automagically approved, and it only takes 5 minutes now for a new repeater to become available and manageable on Brandmeister DMR! Thanks to the collaboration of Brandmeister and RadioID developers, the repeater data is imported in Brandmeister, and sysop rights are automatically added. No need to ask and wait for this to be done manually!

A faster dashboard – The dashboard is now responsive, repeater owners can set passwords on their own, hotspot and repeaters list display twice as fast as they used to, and the last-heard is faster than it has ever been!

Brandmeister Core updates – the core Brandmeister software has seen 48 updates in 2021, bringing lots of performance improvements as well as amazing new features such as the Asterisk’s AudioSocket protocol, TextCapture, and the optimization of Wires-X bridging.

We recognize that all these improvements would not have been possible without:

The time and devotion of the developpers involved in the many aspects of Brandmeister

Hams contributing their time to testing and reporting issues to the development team

Master administrators maintaining, troubleshooting, and updating the servers that make Brandmeister accessible to ham radio operators worldwide

Support teams spending countless hours helping fellow ham operators

User’s donations

Users providing computing ressources and hosting

We have more to come for 2022 … so stay tuned, and Happy New Year!