My brother sent me one for Christmas, it should be here tomorrow, he is not exactly punctual sending out packages.
Anyway, is this a decent DMR radio, or is he sending me a piece of crap? I now have to learn about digital, and codeplugs, oh joy.
From what I can gather, a code plug is just a more involved way to program the radio vs analog U/V. There are three Brandmeister repeaters somewhat close to me, but I an sure I won't be able to hit them with 5w, even with an external antenna on the house, two are about 15 miles, and one about 20 miles away. I guess I will have to get a hotspot, and learn how to program that as well.
Any tips would be appreciated, and any videos or websites that will make this process easier would be welcome as well.
I have a ysf mobile as my base station, and I am not sure if it could connect to those repeaters, I have not explored that possibility, just use it as an analog radio right now.
I had a stroke a couple of years back, and learning new things has become more of a challenge, so please be gentle with me as I try to learn this stuff.

I don't know yet.   I should have 2 of them by this weekend.  
Did your brother pre program it to talk with his?

Lol, no. He is not a ham, he just decided to get me this radio without asking me what I wanted. It was nice of him to do it, but now I have to get my brain to comprehend a bunch of new things.

Dmr is a pita to program. I highly recommend you find an Elmer that already has one you can clone for your local repeaters.

Imagine making a phonebook from scratch, that also has 45000 chat groups and users that need to be all colated correctly.  Also the cheaper radios have terribly buggy software.

I don't see any reason, barring terrain, that you wouldn't be able to hit repeaters 15-20 miles away with it.

If you have a handful of repeaters in your area that you always use it's a great little radio, but if you travel a lot or need to manually punch in analog repeaters or whatever you'll end up pulling your hair out. The TYT radios were originally designed as commercial radios that were meant to be "set and forget", and not made from an amateur radio point of view where it's valuable to program things on the fly.

I have a tyt uv8000 that I program in Chirp, but I don't think chirp is set up to do code plugs. That radio is a pain to program on the front as well.
Can two digital radios with different (dmr, ysf) systems talk to each other in digital mode?

I have the same radio and found a codeplug in a DMR Facebook group.

The analog side of the radio is quite good and easy to program with the CPS you can download from TYT's website.

I can't comment on the DMR aspect of the radio as I have never been successful at configuring my hotspot and/or codeplug.  The last time I dabbled with DMR was before I found out my WiFi router was fubar.  I'm very curious if I can get DMR configured since I've gotten rid of my junk router.

No to both.  Chirp cannot program your DMR radio.  Neither can/will RTSystems.  In 90% of cases you're stuck with the software the DMR radio vendor provides.

No.  Different digital modes (in amateur radio land) are not interoperable.  You just asked if token ring networks could "hook" to ethernet networks directly and work.

Anyone have any experience with this firmware that is supposed to make things easier?

https://md380.org/

I installed it a couple years ago. If I recall, it seemed to add some nifty features.

I don't remember what exactly because I haven't seen the radio in over a year. It isn't lost - it is somewhere in my lab.

Kind of, if you are using a hotspot to talk between the modes. (Thats not the right terminology, and I cannot explain it well, but...) my Yaesu radio can talk to dmr repeaters, and vise versa. The hotspot converts between the ypes of signals based on how you configure it.

Again, not worded well, but someone will be along to fix it.

Here is a TYT UV 380 DMR code plug as an example.

http://www.dmrva.org/download/tyt-uv-md-380/

Its all the DMR repeaters in the state of Virginia. There also seems to be some digital and analog simplex.

If you want to program your own Dmr repeaters its a 3 step process, you program all the Talk Group IDs you want to access into into Digital Contacts, Create Zones, then add channels to the zones.
You can have just one Zone for all channels or create different Zones for different things.
Zones are just like folders to organize channels.

Also Scan Lists have to be created if you want to scan groups of channels.

Download the CPS program from TYT and open the code plug with it and study a DMR channel, it will give you
an example of how to program a single DMR channel.

I would start with an echo channel and go from there. Talk into the echo channel, release PTT and it will repeat what you
said back to you. Great fun to start off with.

If I'm not mistaken this firmware is not for the MD UV 380, only works with the MD380?

EDIT: Dual band radios such as the MD2017 and MD-UV380 series are not supported.

https://github.com/travisgoodspeed/md380tools

Quickie TYT Channel programming:

Here is a quick example for the DMR channel WV Statewide on a Roanoke VA DMR repeater:

https://www.repeaterbook.com/repeaters/details.php?state_id=51&ID=14375
Click on talk group view, and keep this repeater book page open as a reference.

Click on Digital contacts, then create the talk group WV Statewide (name does not matter really) and more importantly the
call ID 3154, AKA Talk Group ID or TG



Next create the channel by right clicking on channel information, then click add:
(the channel entry page will not automatically open, you will have to go into the Channel Information folder,
find it and click on it if I remember correctly)



Put in a channel name, TX and RX frequencies, Select the contact name you created earlier, select color code listed in repeater book (1),
then in the talk group list from repeater book, find the number in the TS (time slot) column in this case its 2.
Select 2 in the repeater slot column. Make the other settings match the picture above.

Right click on Zone Information and click add. Name your zone and add the channel to it.

Click Save at the top of the CPS program. Write to radio using Program menu item, then Write Data.
Done!   I think.

Also, the second channel listed in the code plug I linked previously 147.315 POW is an analog 2m repeater you
can use as an example.

Let me know if you need help or want me to write a code plug with a few of your local channels in it.

EDIT:

Almost forgot, Under General Settings:



Enter your call sign and DMR ID

Register here for your ID number:
https://www.radioid.net/register#

The UV380 had a fairly straightforward code plug, ^^(Good on ya, FTL)^^  The learning curve is exactly what goes to where, setting up digital contacts, private and group calls, channels, and zones.

There are several videos on programming it as it's a popular radio for DMR, and sound quite good transmitting.

OP, if you IM your state, there is probably a code plug you can download for your area at least to see if you can hit the local DMR repeaters.

To get on most Talk Groups, you will need a hotspot.

Thanks for the help so far guys. I am dead in the water until I get a fucking driver installed that will read the radio. I have downloaded it several times from the tyt website, but fucking windows security seems to not want it put on my computer, and I cannot figure out how to disable the fucker. There was a cd that came with the radio, but I cannot find a driver listed in the menu.
I am using fucking pos windows 10.
Edit
I found a driver online, at Maine-dmr.org that would load on my computer and actually work.

OP, here's the screenshots I promised you.

First, create a list of the analog channels you wish to upload to your radio.
Attached File


Then, you create a "zone" that you then populate with the channels you wish to be uploaded to your radio.  You can populate Channel Member A and Channel Member B with whatever channels you want.  I use the same channels for both A and B just for simplicity sake given there's only a couple local channels to choose from.
Attached File

Also, this guy's video is pretty good at explaining the CPS software.

Thanks! Everything has been very helpful so far, I am getting the hang of programming this for at least the analog stuff. I will work on digital stuff next, as soon as I figure out if the dmr repeaters exist or not. Radio ID says yes, repeaterbook says no, and brandmeister says no.

There is an alternative CPS for TYT radios at least, PM me for when it goes beta.
Edit: There does exist Farnsworth's EditCP, which is a good start and runs on the major platforms the OEM CPS doesn't.
It's only the core features, no APRS TX or other things, but at least you can add a channel.
Edit: Oh! And dmrconfig, which has slightly better radio support but slightly worse feature support i think.

Yep. It's defunct, we all moved away from it to other projects.
Alex went SK, Travis got busy with new things, and TYT kept making changes that we had to keep up with, so very little has happened in a while.

Big problem with open source projects is always funding, because intrinsic motivation only works for so long when dealing with drudgery like that.
Could have largely been resolved if TYT was interested in playing ball, but not so much. They never even returned my emails.
Anytone at least was kind enough to reply.

We realized later one of the reasons the manufacturers wouldn't help us is that they often don't actually write the firmware, so they didn't have the details we wanted anyway.

Projects like that and open77 or whatever it is are why i said 90%.  Good to know there are groups out there working on this stuff.




Unpack this please.

Are they subcontracting for it?  Who is writing the firmware?

I just wish the bastards would put basic information in the mostly useless manual.

Any one familiar enough with open77 stuff to recommend returning the TYT's I just bought and getting something open77 compatible?

Good question, and if you find out, I and many others would VERY much like to know.
What I said is already hearsay, so I don't have further details.

I spent a couple months emailing everyone I could find looking to negotiate for documentation, and got nowhere.
Unfortunately, this kinda thing puts the "barrier" in "language barrier".

No, no and, uh, no. The TYT is a much better radio. Your local radio club might lready have a code plug written that needs nothing more than a few simple tweaks.

There's also N0GSG which iirc, works well with the TYT. The TYT is a great radio. The GD 77, not so much.

Why is the GD 77 not a decent radio?