Jae's Blog Creatures and blogs.

Mentioned briefly in my previous post about DMR, I am the proud owner of an Anytone AT-D168UV. Even tho it felt like a cheap radio at first, now that I understand more how it works and what the options do, it’s been really fun to operate.

For the brief specs, this model pushes around 5W in VHF and 4W in UHF, with the added benefit of supporting DMR. It also has enough memory to load the full list of DMR IDs (which you can find on the Pi-Star website). What I like the most is the full-colour screen on the device, this is my first handheld device like this.

I got it from another ham for fairly cheap, but it can usually be found for 150-200€ in retail, so not too bad for something DMR. That’s been my main DMR device since getting it, but until recently, I didn’t go around exploring all the settings.

Let’s get this in first: configuring the radio itself from the radio is a hassle, don’t do it. The screen is very cramped, and entering everything manually is going to take forever. Luckily, AnyTone gives us some software to configure it. Bad news is: it’s on Windows only. The Open-Source equivalent, CHIRP, is also awaiting support for this model, which I am hopeful it will get (if any of the CHIRP contributors are reading this, hit me up on my e-mail or Signal if you think I could help).

Right now, we’re gonna need to work around some issues, the first one being: needing Windows. That’s fairly easily solved, I just spun up some Windows 11 VM in GNOME boxes, and it can also pass through a USB device from the VM settings, sweet!

At this point, we’re set to tweak the radio, just one last thing I discovered when experimenting:

• Do not try to create two channels with the same everything but name and set the two in the same zone. This corrupts the settings for some reason, which will force you to re-upload everything.
• Uploading the full DMR ID list takes forever, so be patient. At first, I used a pretty shoddy cable which made the upload fail, so beware of that as well.

It took me some time to figure out how this model works (my only prior experience being cheap Baofeng radios), but got it figured out:

First, add your DMR ID to the list, as it’ll be the one used when transmitting (and that’s pretty important). I am not sure if the master ID does something for ham use, but filled that one as well with the same values.

Then it goes that way: you can add channels, channels have a set frequency to transmit and receive; can have a specific DMR ID, default talkgroup, or CTCSS depending on if you want to hit an analogue relay. Once you have your channels, you need to add them into a zone; a zone will allow you to go through multiple channel with the middle knob on the radio; for instance, I have one setup for my hotspot, Helsinki and Hamburg, all with different local relays. You can change the zone by clicking the up and down arrows on the keypad.

Once this is all setup, time to send to the radio, wait for a bit, and voilà, it’s configured.

Other small bits of config I have tweaked are:

• Power-on interface: Custom Picture (more on that later).
• Standby char colour: white.
• Display channel number: Actual Channel Name.
• B Channel Name Colour: Orange.
• Zone Name Colour A: Green.
• Zone Name Colour B: Yellow.
• Separate display: On.

Now for some fun: you can actually set a custom background when the radio starts, or is on standby. The only restriction is that the picture needs to be 128×160, and JPG (apparently BMP is supported, but wasn’t working during my tests).

Just use the uploader tool in the software, and you’ll have a nice custom background as well.

Since around September last year, I started using DMR radio. I was just about to come back from Eurofurence when I saw a message in my local radio club’s chat (shoutouts to OH2K) from someone selling a bunch of Anytone AT-D168UV. Before that, I was told that DMR had a pretty large community in Finland, but never really tried it.

Most of my contacts until then were done either on local repeaters, using bog standard VHF radios (Baofengs, Mobira), or on 20m using FT8 and a fancy Xiegu radio.

Now that I’ve been in the DMR world for a few months, I can confidently say that it’s the most fun I’ve had with the hobby so far. From doing a few QSOs after work on a weekday to participating in more organized nets during the weekend, I find it very enjoyable.

I usually hang around the world-wide talkgroup 91, as it is the most active on the Brandmeister network. Sadly, 91 can be a bit of a wild west sometimes with stuff including, but not limited to: people inventing their own phonetic alphabet, audio levels from both ends of the spectrum (AKA will either need you to boost full volume or blast your ears off at minimum), and of course, lots of network issues (EG, you thought you were talking, but nope, someone got the slot before you).

Luckily, TG91 is not the only one, I can cite TG92 (Europe) which sadly was a bit dead today when trying to do a few contacts; TG208 (France) which was also kinda dead, if not for that lone ham that was sitting at their club waiting for calls; and of course, my local one, TG244 (Finland) which is fairly active on weekends and in the weekday evenings.

DMR also has its events, for instance, on TG244, every Sunday at 19:00 (Finland local time), there is the FinDMR check-in, mostly receiving Finnish callsigns from all over the country.

On TG91, every Saturday at 16:00 (UTC), there is the World-Wide Check-In, which this time goes through the entire world for people to check-in. In late December, I actually joined the net controller group for the World-Wide Check-In and managed my first net on 2026/01/17. Reading a script and callsigns back might seem a bit boring at first, but in the end, it’s pretty fun and requires some degree of concentration.

During my first net, it felt like I completely messed up. My hotspot (more on that later) overheated and missed the two first countries because of that. I also had the logging a bit wrong, so certain callsigns didn’t go through as they should have. For the second one, on 2026/01/24, I was a bit more prepared, tho forgot to add more calls to certain countries with more callsigns (for instance, Finland needs at least three rounds, while I only called two times).

For those curious, I’m currently using an Anytone AT-D168UV in combination with a Pi-Star MMDVM hotspot.

And for people saying DMR is “cheating”, I don’t care, I’m having fun, and it’s certainly cheaper and simpler than having to buy or making a huge antenna (which I won’t be able to install anyways). I might as well sell my HF hardware given I have close to no use for it (maybe to at some point buy one of those really fancy Hytera DMR radios).

If you want to do a contact, look for me in either 91, 92 or 244; or send me a message (e-mail/Signal) to schedule a QSO (yeah, I know, more cheating).

A friend sent me a link to an interesting blog post talking about making an Open-Source DMR radio using a LimeSDR board and GNU Radio.

Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) is a mobile radio standard created by ETSI, which is very popular within the amateur radio community. […]
A very basic DMR modem (receiver and transmitter), capable of voice calls, that could emulate a subscriber radio using a SDR transceiver as the radio interface is described in this page.
While this modem is just a proof-of-concept interpretation of the DMR standard with no real use-case, there exists at least one open source project which proposes to create an open source DMR transceiver.

You can see the full blog post over there: https://qradiolink.org/open-source-DMR-transceiver-implementation.html