As Field Day 2024 approaches, I remember back to Field Day 2009, 15 years ago to the early days of Ham DMR. We had QSO that possibly sparked the beginning of Amateur Radio DMR adoption. Back then it was Motorola’s MotoTRBO client radios and repeaters only. There was no DMR-MARC, Brandmeister, Hotspots or inexpensive Chinese radios. More importantly to DMR growth, there was no linking options for DMR repeaters.
Motorola had just released firmware (V3) that supported IP linking (known as IPSC). On that Field Day 3 hams who owned those early dealer demo package repeaters (XPR-8300’s) updated the repeater firmware and planned to link the 3 repeaters together to form the first Ham DMR IPSC network. The 3 repeaters were set up temporarily in a shop, a bedroom and a kitchen in California and Iowa. It was a success as well as 15 years later with some 200,000 hams with registered radio ID’s All 3 of us are still active in DMR but have gone our separate roads.
On June 27, 2009, Field Day, we had the first HAM DMR linked Motorola MotoTRBO repeaters QSO in the USA if not worldwide. The there hams involved and in the audio recording are;
- WA6NVL, Ray in Los Angeles CA
- WB0VHB, Randy in MT Union Iowa
- WB6WUI (now NO7RF), Mike in Costa Mesa CA
Hear the QSO Snippet // History Page /// History Detail
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