Back in December, I wrote a post about my initial impressions of the Alinco DJ-MD5GP Type 90 approved DMR/Analog Dual Band HT. With no DMR repeaters nearby (and only a couple in all of RI), I needed to use this with a ZumSpot. I described my mostly failed attempts as well. The problem I was experiencing was that one I selected a talkgroup, it seemed that it was always selected. So if I picked North America, and later picked Rhode Island, then the North America selection remained active. I was getting a lot of chatter that I didn’t want to hear.
A few months later, Scott K4SEH, commented to me that he was having no problem, doing exactly what I had tried to do originally (programming a single frequency/channel for my Hotspot, then programming a list of all the talkgroups I was interested in).
I finally had some time to give things another try yesterday. First things first, I updated the ZumSpot software to the latest version, then changed over to DMR mode. At that point, things started working exactly as I would have hoped. Using the red button <List>, I would see my contact list (which is just a list of talkgroups), scroll down to the one I wanted, then press the green button to <Select> the one I wanted. That brings me to the “Option” menu, which I scroll down to find the “Select” entry. A final press of the green button <Select> activates that talkgroup.
Can say for sure why it works now and did not in December. My DJ-MD5 is still running version 1.02 firmware, and has the same code plug as I was using back in December, so it isn’t that. However there have been multiple updates to the Dashboard as well as the Pi-Star software since then, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the fix (but how the heck multiple code groups could work through a Zumspot is beyond me).
With the talkgroup selection now working cleanly, I’ve revised my opinion of the radio upward. It is reasonably priced around $150 (less than half of a ID-51 DSTAR radio), about the same as the Yaesu YSF FT-70D. I paid $130 for my slightly more expensive DJ-MD5GP GPS version on sale back in December. At that time, the GPS was mostly useless, but I understand that the latest firmware adds D-APRS support.
