PMR


A simpler route to digital with dPMR M


anning the dPMR Association’s stand was Malcolm Lyman, who works for


the chip developer CML, one of the associa- tion’s member companies. “It’s growing all the time”, he said. “I think there’s about nine manufacturers now making dPMR, and it’s in direct competition to DMR. “It is a simpler system, and the idea is it’s


lower-cost and easier to implement than DMR, and it doesn’t have the IPR [intellectual property rights] costs of DMR. That’s why a number of companies are moving into it. I notice there are a few here – Kirisun, Kenwood, Icom have all got equipment on show here. “Analogue manufacturers today, they


have to make a choice, really, of Tetra, DMR or dPMR. Tetra is quite a complicated system


Implementing dPMR: a new chipset by CML


and expensive, with a big learning curve; DMR is the next layer down, and that has also quite a large learning curve – whereas dPMR is a much simpler system to implement. However, it still offers the same functions – it offers peer-to-peer, Mode 2 and trunking.


DMR Tier III dispatching


Also shown by Alcatel-Lucent was this radiating cable by its affi liate RFS. It is designed for supplying coverage in underground locations – note the radiating slot cut in the copper shield. Jérôme Brouet says: “It spans from the lowest, 400 MHz band, but it goes to 2.6 GHz – which means that in this single radiating cable you can have Tetra, GSM, 3G, LTE – professional and commercial frequencies”


Chris Cant, of Tait, with a Zetron dispatch console allied to Tait’s DMR Tier III infrastructure


whose DMR dispatch software was demon- strated on the Tait stand. “It’s connected via IP ethernet, through our node switching”, explained Christine Cant. “Basically this is very confi gura- ble, but at the moment we’ve confi gured it up so that we can do talkgroup calls, individual calls.... You can also dial them. You can do a radio check, which is just asking whether the radio is turned on. You can do a short text message, which is a 50 character text to the radio, and status messages, which are pre-programmed. You can stun and re- vive the radios: say, if you’ve detected maybe that a radio has been stolen, or with the AVL solution you can see that it’s disappeared off the radar, you can stun it so that it can’t be used.”


A 16


mong Tait’s collaborators in its Tier III DMR trunking programme is Zetron,


In addition, she said, there is great fl exibility


for patching calls across multiple networks – for example, a DMR network could be patched through the console to a Tetra network. “A lot of people want gateways, so they want full functionality, but you can do it through a dis- patch.” Since the dispatching package is all-IP, it can


support multiple control rooms at multiple locations. For smaller, less complex DMR net- works, Zetron off ers an alternative system which can be as simple as a desktop dispatch terminal. “It’s all using the open interface standard that has been ratifi ed by the DMR Association and written into the ETSI standard”, Chris Cant continued. “It’s an open protocol that all manu- facturers use.”


Daisy Zhang, of Kirisun, shows a rugged DMR handportable, the DP770. Meeting the IP67 and MIL 810 standards, it is equipped with a daylight-readable fi ve-line graphical colour display and integrated GPS, vox and lone worker functions, an optional man-down sensor, text messaging and a vibrating alert


LAND mobile January 2013


“There is an overlap with DMR and some manufacturers are going that way and some are going this way. It’s a bit diffi cult for CML, in a way, because we represent both! We have chips that are representing both DMR and dPMR – and Tetra – so we have chips in all those systems!


“One of the things about dPMR is that the backward compatibility to analogue is an advantage. “It’s much easier to make an FDMA radio


fl ip between 6¼ kHz digital and 12½ kHz analogue, whereas a DMR radio has got to fl ip between two-slot TDMA and analogue; it’s a bit more diffi cult. But then we have the chip for DMR as well!”


• Information: www.dpmr-mou.org


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