Setting up New DVmega-RPi 3B Dual-Band Hotspot

A friend of mine wanted a Hotspot for his home, which is far enough away from our DSTAR repeater to connect to without resorting to high power and a high gain antenna.  I volunteered to set up a RPi 3B based DVmega for him, and he ordered the kit of parts form gigaparts.

I was expecting to clone my image and change the call signs, but not before checking out the latest build supplied with the kit.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they had changed the OS to Raspbian with PIXEL.  It also changed over to MMDVMHost with Dashboard.

In theory gigaparts did all the work on the setup.  That might be the case for their own needs, but it wasn’t working for me.

There were two missing bits of information that would have been helpful on their limited single-sheet instruction:

1. They claimed the username/password was pi & pi.  That’s not correct.  It is pi & raspberry
2. They failed to mention that the MMDVMHost setup.php program should be run so that whatever MMDVM usernames/passwords could be modified.

Probably because of #2, I was NOT able to get the RF working.  I checked my older load and everything worked fine, so that meant it had to be a configuration issue.  Eventually I noticed that while I was hearing nothing on my HT, the DVmega was transmitting almost constantly.  Turns out it was repeating DMR signals.

I made the following changes to the MMDVM.ini file (in the MMDVMHost directory) and things started working correctly:

[Info]
RXFrequency=144900000
TXFrequency=144900000
Power=1
Latitude=41.5
Longitude=-71.5
Height=0
Location=Narragansett RI

… … …

[D-Star]
Enable=1
Module=C
SelfOnly=0

[DMR]
Enable=0
Beacons=0
… … …

I REALLY like the MMDVMHost-Dashboard, especially the Buttons that allow updates of the reflector, restarts, shutdowns, etc.  Exactly what is needed to manage a headless RPi.

But at least until I rerun the setup.php program I have no idea what the assigned username/password is for each of the Dashboard buttons.