WB4SON

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BlueDV Running with DV 3K Dongle

Posted: 25 May 2020 10:38 AM PDT
https://wb4son.com/wpblog/?p=4120


Taking full advantage of a reduced workload these past few days, I found
myself thinking of DMR again after stumbling across the Zumspot AMBE
Server.Â* That seemed like an excellent non-radio means of bringing up DMR,
DSTAR or Fusion on any Windows box here at the house.Â* So I placed an order
and hopefully will be able to play around with it in a week or so.

Meanwhile, it seems like PA7LIMs BlueDV is the software that many people
are using with the AMBE Server or various USB Dongles, so I downloaded a
copy in hopes of getting it to work with my old DV3K Dongle, something I
had only used for DSTAR using DVTool.Â* Since that used a AMBE3000R chip, I
felt there was a small chance it might work with BlueDV, which would make
it usable on DMR, Fusion, and DSTAR as well.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out it worked quite well, and within
about 30 minutes of trying a few options, BlueDV was up and running.
Chatting with Walter K5WH via the DMR 98006 AMSAT Talk Group

The setup was pretty simple.Â* I guessed that the slower baud rate was used
for the old device (located on COM6 on my PC), and assumed all the DMR ID
settings would be mine (3144032).Â* (Just a FYI, it appears the SETUP menu
cant be selected if any of the SERIAL, DMR, DSTAR, or FUSION switches are
Active along the left side of the screen.)



The only non-obvious thing to me was a need to setup the AMBE tab (along
the top), as it was completely blank when I started things going.Â* However,
when I pulled down the choices I saw my mic and speaker selections which
made perfect sense.



Finally I guessed that I needed to use the other AMBE tab to the right to
select a talk group, and I set that to AMSAT 98006 (BrandMeister).

My last two stumbling blocks were forgetting that nothing would happen on
DMR until I pressed PTT to get the Talk Group set.Â* Now where is that PTT
button????Â* That took a tad bit of exploring and I found a YouTube video
from TechMinds that revealed the magic solution use the bottom right
AMBE3000 slider by clicking on it to turn TX on, and clicking again to turn
TX off!
The PTT in AMBE3000 mode is the slider in the lower right corner. Click for
PTT

I look forward to trying this with the AMBE Server that will make this a
solution I can run from pretty much everywhere.