DMRTexas.net

Texas doesn’t have any repeaters on DMR-MARC. DMR-MARC is a CBridge, one out of dozens, perhaps hundreds in Amateur Radio today. Texas has five eight CBridges in Texas and none of them are owned or operated by DMR-MARC.

The original Lonestar CBridge in Texas is where the original TG3148 (Texas Statewide) was originated, and still maintains “authority” for that talkgroup today. That talkgroup is routed to other CBridges such as CBridge2.0 and DilloDMR, and to many repeaters in Texas and outside of Texas. It is important to know that talkgroup 3148 on Brandmeister is NOT connected to Lonestar’s talkgroup 3148. Brandmeister came online in 2015, about 5 years after we had the Lonestar CBridge and several repeaters in Texas for DMR. The original idea for the sake of simplicity was to duplicate the existing talkgroups which caused some confusion and a new technical hurdle.

Brandmeister has some good features and good things they do well with their network, but one of the unintended consequences of the duplication of existing Statewide talkgroups, is the lack of linking across these two networks. Texas is just one of the states that experience this issue. So now we receive a lot of questions from people asking why the Texas Statewide DMR Net on our TG3148 ‘Lonestar’ talkgroup is not being received when they connect to TG3148 on Brandmeister. The short answer is that Lonestar was spun up in 2010, our weekly Statewide Net was started in late 2013, both on the only TG3148 that existed at that specific time. When Brandmeister duplicated all the statewide talkgroups across the CBridge based networks, it created this confusion and many headaches to those trying to configure their radios and hotspots. You are probably correct with your programming but limited by the networks not being interlinked.

Jason, KC5HWB, did a fantastic talk at TAPR DCC 2018 on this very issue. You can find it here: