In this tutorial we’ll show you how to configure your new radio, out of the box, using the Connect Systems CS800D radio as an example. Other radios should have similarly named functions, with notable exceptions mentioned throughout.
The first thing you should do with any new radio is “Read” the radio and save it’s program to your local PC. From this file you will create your own radio personality file.
One thing worthy of mentioning is that some people see check boxes for “features” they don’t understand and have an inclination to enable these features. The rule of thumb in DMR is if you don’t understand what a feature does, leave it disabled unless we specify differently. This will ensure your radio is optimized to work in our network environment.
The critical settings in the menu above are:
- Radio ID (insert your own DMR ID number here)
- Tx Preamble Duration (set to 960 ms)
- Repeater Group and Private Call Hang Times: (set to 5 and 8 seconds, respectively)
- Do not use Enhanced Channel Access
Next: Create a list of Group Contacts
Moving on to channel programming:
Let’s walk through the example for 444.375 shown above. Since KS-DMR re-uses the same five frequencies throughout the state, we do not recommend naming these channels by “town”, but rather by the frequency and group contained in that channel. Since all five of the channels are 444.xxx MHz, we truncate the leading digits and use “375 Kansas” to note that we are on 444.375 and talk group “Kansas”.
- Channel Alias: 375 Kansas
- Color Code: 1 (all KS-DMR repeaters use Color Code 1)
- Time Slot: 2
- RX Freq: 444.375
- TX Freq: 449.375
- TX Contact: Kansas
- TX Admit: Color Code Free (Exception: MD380 users should set this to “Always” or the radio does not function correctly)
- TX Time-Out Time: 180 seconds
- Do not check any other check boxes.
