Pi-Star home hotspot.

Popoutman

With my recent secondhand purchase of my Yaesu FT-70D, I had purchased from the same guy an MMDVM hotspot. The hotspot is a lovely little box, containing a RaspberryPi W Zero and a MMDVM_HS Hat add-on board, and the board has a little OLED screen on it, and there's a little stubby UHF antenna sticking up.

The home hotspot is intended to allow someone that has a digital-capable handheld transceiver to access the digital networks and chat room channels without having to go through a public repeater.

The hardware of the home hotspot runs an image from Pi-Star which is a modified Raspberry Pi OS "Buster" version of the defacto RPi standard OS. The original idea for this particular design was by DF2ET and DB9MAT and has unfortunately been built by the Chinese without license from the designers.

The software should allow any of the normal digital formats to be used to access the digital networks, whether it use Fusion/DMR/D*Star/P25/NXDN. There should also be the possibility to use a Fusion radio to access the DMR infrastructure - something that was not considered possible previously and has removed one of the problems with digital amateur radio.

There's a fair bit of configuration involved in the software, as there's IDs and configurations for each of the digital modes, and some of those require registration on the backend service, and the registration may require upload of documentation regarding the HAREC license before access is granted to that digital network.

I've run into a problem with my DMR configuration. Brandmeister is the entity that controls access to a lot of the DMR infrastructure. I'd like to access the DMR infrastructure as the Southern Ireland Repeater Group is carried on TG27240 on the Brandmeister network. I successfully got my DMR ID from https://register.ham-digital.org/ and it took a few days for the Brandmeister systems to be able to confirm that yes my callsign and that ID did in fact match. The bigger problem is that Brandmeister's email server is misconfigured, and connections carrying emails coming from the server are being denied access to other email servers, as there are problems making the secure connection. (The secure connections when properly configured reduces significantly the amount of spam mail being accepted by an email server, and is a standard part of the email infrastructure). Because their emails are not being sent correctly, my registration email has not arrived, nor has the note that my DMR access to Brandmeister servers should be active and available. And to top it all off, the DMT helpdesk system requires an email confirmation before access is granted to open a ticket - leading to a catch-22. I've reached out to them on Twitter as an attempt to open an alternate communication channel.

At the moment I have the hotspot working with Fusion protocol, and I'm able to take part in the IE_YSF_IRELAND group, had a nice chat with lads in Belfast and Roscommon as if they were local to me, significantly better sound quality than any mobile phone call. I've also got Wires-X apparently working as well.
My hope is to get the YSF2DMR gateway stuff working as I would hope, and that I will be able to access the all-Ireland groups as well as the Southern Repeater group. I'll first have to make sure I can access BM servers..

Popoutman

Success in getting the Yaesu to access the TG27240 on DMR, which is the Southern Ireland Repeater Group.

Settings needed in Pi-Star:
YSF and YSF2DMR enabled.
YSF Startup Host: YSF00002 - Link YSF2DMR
dmr ID entered correctly and I had a "01" appended
DMR Master: I chose BM_Ireland_2721
Security: blank
DMR TG 27240.

I may be getting dropped from the talkgroup, but I'm not sure of that yet

Malmsteen

You might have tried this already and if you have I apologize in advance..... but have you tried accessing the Brandmeister Dashboard this way and register direct: https://brandmeister.network/?page=register and then set up your Selfcare for you and your MMDVM Hotspot.. might help hopefully.. Regards M.

Popoutman

Yep, that's how I had attempted to register.

I know the issue is on their mailserver config, as I can access my mailserver logs and seeing that the connections are being (correctly) dropped when the secure connection cannot be started, so the receiving mailserver will not recieve that sending server's email load.

Mailservers are configured to drop the connection when it cannot be authenticated, to prevent the influx of spam from rogue servers. It's likely that BM have forgotten to renew a certificate. I know the config on my receiving mailserver is correct, as it receives email for ~700 people without problems, and happily gets mail from Gmail and other services that are cranky about correct setups.

As it turns out, I didn't need to have the BM account to access the talkgroups on the BM nodes, so there's less pressure to get that account set up and validated. It does show a hole in their process though, as it's not possible for me to raise the ticket. Anyone else that has an account on BM could start a support ticket to tell BM they can't get some new accounts set up properly because of their misconfiguration.

Thanks for the link to the direct registration, I'm sure someone else will find it useful at some point.

Malmsteen

Popoutman wrote: »

Yep, that's how I had attempted to register.

I know the issue is on their mailserver config, as I can access my mailserver logs and seeing that the connections are being (correctly) dropped when the secure connection cannot be started, so the receiving mailserver will not recieve that sending server's email load.

Mailservers are configured to drop the connection when it cannot be authenticated, to prevent the influx of spam from rogue servers. It's likely that BM have forgotten to renew a certificate. I know the config on my receiving mailserver is correct, as it receives email for ~700 people without problems, and happily gets mail from Gmail and other services that are cranky about correct setups.

As it turns out, I didn't need to have the BM account to access the talkgroups on the BM nodes, so there's less pressure to get that account set up and validated. It does show a hole in their process though, as it's not possible for me to raise the ticket. Anyone else that has an account on BM could start a support ticket to tell BM they can't get some new accounts set up properly because of their misconfiguration.

Thanks for the link to the direct registration, I'm sure someone else will find it useful at some point.

Was actually chatting to a fellow Ham about this recently and he suggested you contact the BrandMiester Admins direct via the "Telegram" app. Join the group with your call and explain your situation and they should get on it... find the link below...hope this helps you out
https://t.me/BRANDMEISTERGENERALSUPPORT?fbclid=IwAR2uglo3HoRLU3RG2B5y4LP0rOabkhAYDNy1tS8cGbYTg6Yvje6ucY7kmrM

Popoutman

I got my account confirmed, seems my mailserver's TLS configuration needs updating as the version of Postfix is too old. Update of that server needed soon..

I created a thread "who's got DMR" ?

Lets see if we can arrange a QSO there.