I thought I was going to do that with the ConnectSystems CS7000, but CS is taking way too long to bring that radio to market. So when State of the Art Communications in Russiaville got in a load of Tytera MD-380 DMR handhelds and put them on eBay for under $200 shipped, and with the programming cable to boot, I bit. (That link looks like it’s good till about July 4, unless they sell them out before that.)
I think I ordered it Sunday and I got it today.
I was a bit irked however that the Hoosier DMR group doesn’t actually offer a codeplug for the MD-380. In fact they seem to be more interested in throwing DMR repeaters up all over the state than in keeping their website up to date and useful. It is not simple to program one of these handhelds by hand, and you probably wouldn’t want to, anyway, since the codeplug I ended up hacking (originally for the CS700) contains over 700 digital contacts.
So I did manage to hack the codeplug with my copy of UltraEdit, no huhu, and used the DMR2 software that I downloaded from TYT to load it in.
My only irk at the moment is that the battery is taking God’s own time to charge. It was showing a full battery indicator when I powered it up the first time, but I thought I’d stick it in the charger and top it off as the manual recommends. I did see a review somewhere that carped about this radio taking “hours” to charge…I don’t think they were lying.
And the manual…is written in liberal Chinglish. It is not unreadable but it is not something I’d take to bed with me, because it would irritate me too much. And interestingly enough there is no photo anywhere in the book that tells you what the different icons on the (very nice) color LCD screen are. I guess you just have to guess. This radio could benefit from someone doing a significant edit on it like the one that was done for the Baofeng UV-5R.
All that said, the sound is pretty good for digital. Nice and crisp and punches right out there except when someone gets too close to the end of the repeater’s rope, and then it just cuts off. The cool thing was powering it up and hitting the SCAN button and immediately being rewarded by hearing a QSO between a guy in Ontario and another guy in Florida on the North America talk group.
The radio has a nice shape and size — some reviewer likened it to a brick, both in shape and in heft — and appears quite well made, although I imagine the plastic spring belt clip will not last long. It has a typical stock rubber duck, of course, but it’s a 70cm radio so the shortness probably isn’t all that critical. It does have a standard SMA connector, though, so I might try the Diamond SRH77CA from my Yaesu VX-8G on it just for kicks.
And because I am a nice guy, here is the codeplug I’m using, with my call and radio ID edited out of course, so you’ll need to load this into the software to change it. It’s a .ZIP file because WordPress objected to the bare .RDT file.