A few posts down, back in July, I opined on DMR being an evolutionary dead end, and gave a few reasons for that.
And for the last few days, DMR-MARC has been having major DNS issues.
Yet sandwiched in the middle of Facebook posts about the DMR-MARC problems, comes a ham talking about how superior DMR is to Yaesu Fusion. Or, at least, going on about all the problems the new Yaesu Fusion lineup is being “plagued” with.
Here’s the trick. Yaesu didn’t adopt DMR, probably for a reason. They already have WIRES and WIRES-X for that, and outside of Japan, I don’t know that anyone has ever really adoped WIRES.
(Be aware that I don’t have any Fusion equipment and all I know about it is what I have heard. So some of the below is speculation on my part.)
Comparing Fusion and DMR, despite the fact that I don’t own any Fusion equipment, seems like apples and oranges to me. Fusion isn’t designed to do what DMR or WIRES or D-STAR do. It does both analog and digital voice across the same repeater. With WIRES-X, sure, you can probably do something similar to DMR. I don’t hear people locally talking about WIRES-X, though — just Fusion.
I’m going to go out on a limb and state that any new lineup of hardware is going to have issues. If you point to DMR and say, well, look how short a time DMR has been out there and it doesn’t have anywhere near the problems, I’ll respond that DMR has been around for a LONG time and got the bugs worked out of it by Motorola’s commercial customers. Sure, Yaesu could have rebadged some of its Vertex commercial equipment and gone DMR. But they chose to innovate rather than pass along existing technology.
The current DMR-MARC outage makes me even more convinced that the dream of using DMR for emergency management is going to come crashing down once it strikes home that the Internet isn’t a reliable way to communicate in a crisis. The actual net isn’t down — now. But the DMR-MARC outage is suggestive of how a coordinated attack — or just plain “bad luck” — might take down the links between nodes and c-bridges in a real emergency.
Again, I’m not saying that this wouldn’t affect WIRES and WIRES-X networks, but Yaesu seems to have divined that it’s important to be able to bridge between analog and digital locally as well as through the Internet, and have designed their new repeaters and radios for that purpose. While most of the DMR radios I’ve seen will do both analog and digital, I don’t think they’ll bridge analog and digital on the same repeater in the way that Fusion does.
Anyway, what do I know, I am only an egg.