DPRM (was: Yaesu Digital announcement)

[Kristoff Bonne]

Hi,



This is part of a discussion on a D-STAR related yahoo groups. I moved it here as it isn't about D-STAR anymore.


An interesting source of information about another Digital Voice system: Digital PMR446; which is a digital version of the NBFM PMR446 (between 446.0 and 446.1 Mhz in Europe).

It is defined from ETSI, the same organisation that designed things like GSM and UMTS. There is a "MOU" organisation that filled in some holes in the specification, e.g. concerning the choice of audio codec.

As ETSI specifications are open and public, it's interesting to have a look at them and compair them to the other digital voice systems (like D-STAR)
 
Also interesting, as there is a field in the header that allows selection of the codec, it would be interesting to see if this could not be used as DV container-format for codec2 based DV.
It would require some changes to the header as it probably not large enough to hold ham callsigns.


73
Kristoff - ON1ARF

On 28-12-11 00:17, Trevor . wrote:

 

This is an ICOM 4-FSK UHF rig thats been sold in Europe for years.

Icom IC-F4029SDR Transceiver for Digital PMR 446
http://www.southgatearc.org/news/march2008/digital_pmr_446.htm

The only question is why did ICOM continue to sell GMSK rigs to the ham market ?

OK, before we go completely off-topic here, just one link:

DPMR (digital PMR) is standardised by the ETSI (European Telecom Standardisation Institute, the same organisation after such things as GSM, UMTS, ISDN, and others) and there is "MOU" organisation that has filled up some remaining "gaps" in the specs that where not specified by ETSI (like the choice of voice codec).

It concists of two sets of standards: a "level 1" standard for peer-to-peer communication in unlicensed radio-spectrum (466.1-466.2 Mhz, just above the 8 NBFM channels of the PMR466 radios); and a "level 2" standard for professional users, including the use of repeaters, and so on.

All the specs of ETSI are open and can be freely downloaded, either at the ETSI website http://pda.etsi.org/ or here:
http://dpmr-mou.org/dpmr-downloads-technical.htm  and here: http://dpmr-mou.org/dpmr-ETSI-standard.htm

As with most ETSI specs, the specification are very well written and good documented. (quite a difference from the D-STAR specs :-) ). Anycase, interesting reading for everybody interested in the inner working of digital voice!!!