Category: DMR News

Happy Birthday BrandMeister DMR !

Three years ago, after eleven months of intense tests and development, a new software emerged in the amateur radio DMR realm with features never seen before. New master servers appeared quickly in many countries, thus creating the BrandMeister DMR Network. Sysops connected their repeaters to the network to enjoy the features, and digital ham operators over the world quickly adopted the new platform for their DMR transmissions.

BrandMeister quickly included inter-connectivity allowing international operators using mixed digital and analog technologies to have QSOs together (D-STAR, C4FM, NXDN, Analog).

Today, as we are celebrating BrandMeister DMR’s 3rd birthday: the network is counting 44 master servers installed across the world, 2600 repeaters and 7800 hotspots are connected and an average of 30 concurrent calls are taking place at all times !

This birthday is an opportunity to acknowledge all the volunteers who contributed in the success of BrandMeister by spending countless hours in programming, setting up servers and hosting platforms, testing, translating, documenting, and providing users and sysops support. BrandMeister also received donations which contributed to the implementation of new features and new hardware support on the servers. Thank you to everyone for your contribution ! 

In just one year of time, several major features have been added to BrandMeister, such as:

• User API keys
• Abell R-80 Repeater support
• Radio-check support for Motorola and Hytera radios
• Support of XLX interlink
• Support for NXDN gateways
• IP-connectivity (RoIP) for Hytera PDC760
• Support for Open Bridge with IPSC2 servers
• Support of DAPNET Gate and group SMS roaming
• A new support portal and knowledgebase has also been created for helping dmr users and repeater owners.

This coming year, you can continue to expect a lot of new things! Stay tuned for news about optimizations, Open DMR Terminal Protocol, Wires-X, APIs and more!

BrandMeister DMR will have a booth at the Ham Radio 2018 exhibition in Friedrichshafen Germany. Come check us at booth #A1-742 !

As DMR made its debut in Amateur Radio, hams had to figure out which numerical identifier to use when programming DMR radios since there was no way to use alphanumerical callsigns. It was decided to use 7-digit numbers to identify radio operators; and to setup a public on-line database that provides the correspondance between the IDentifier and the amateur radio callsign.

It was further decided that the first 3 digits of the IDentifier would follow the Mobile Country Code numbering as defined in the ITU-T Recommendation E.212. This first 3 digits of the ID you are entering in your DMR radio are therefore identifying your geographical origin :

1 – Test networks
2 – Europe
3 – North America and the Caribbean
4 – Asia and the Middle East
5 – Oceania
6 – Africa
7 – South and Central America
9 – World-wide

BrandMeister is based on open-standards, which is a critical aspect of the network as it is open to third-party developers. It is therefore critical to stay consistent and follow standards.

We have noticed some users operating on the BrandMeister network with IDentifiers starting with the number 1 (example 1118001, a station in Indiana, USA). These numbers do not follow the MCC numbering standard and therefore it causes issues and confusion in third party systems with region-specific features.

Two organizations exist for issuance of DMR ID’s, DMR-MARC and Ham-Digital. Once it was realized that DMR-MARC started issuing IDentifiers outside the already agreed upon MCC numbering standard, administrators and system operators with the BrandMeister network reached out to the leadership with DMR-MARC to come to a viable solution that would rectify this issue and retain the MCC numbering standard. That was nearly 2 years ago. Since then, dozens of attempts were made to reach out to leadership with DMR-MARC to come to a solution to this issue, but those organizations will not communicate back with us regarding this. They have ignored every single attempt BrandMeister leadership has made to them.

While we have left the 1XX IDentifiers operating on the BrandMeister network temporarily, the unfortunate result, because of the lack of communication and cooperation from the organizations in charge of issuing ID’s, will be the restriction of importing NEW 1XX numbers starting May 1^st, 2018.

So, what does this mean:  Beginning May 1^st, 2018, BrandMeister will stop importing new 1XXYYYY USA ID’s from DMR-MARC. All existing ID’s will continue functioning, meaning if you were issued an ID in the 1XXYYYY format (example 1118001), your ID will continue to work. Any new USA ID’s issued in this format after May 1^st will no longer. If you are issued a DMR identifier after May 1^st, 2018 that doesn’t follow the MCC numbering standard (i.e. starting with 1XXYYYY) and want to use the BrandMeister DMR network, please make sure to request a correct ID before this deadline.

We truly realize the monumental impact this decision brings to the various BrandMeister sub-networks as well as all the users of BrandMeister this has the potential to affect. Rest assured, we are not giving up, and will continue to reach out to the DMR-MARC leadership before the May 1^st cutoff to try and come to a cooperative solution. We encourage you as well, the users, repeater trustees, network administrators, system operators, etc. to reach out to both DMR-MARC and encourage them to have a productive conversation with the BrandMeister admins. Only through cooperation and collaboration will there be a resolution.

DMR-MARC:

idteam@dmr-marc.net

quescom@dmr-marc.net