Pi-Star home hotspot.

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..