DMR Roaming and other Features

Basics

https://fortunefavorstheprepared.com/preparedness-book-of-knowledge-2/communications/amateur-ham-radio/dmr-roaming/

Motorola

TBA

Anytone

https://pnwdigital.net/anytone-gps-roam/

At a minimum:

1. Create roaming channels. Each Roaming Channel is simply a repeater or a specific time slot on a repeater that you might possibly want to roam to. Personally I created two channels for each repeater, one for each time slot.

2. Create one or more roaming zones. Each Roaming Zone is a list of roaming channels that you want to be active together. Personally I create a Roaming Zone for each static Talk Group of interest.

3. Optionally set up auto roaming by configuring the parameters in the "Auto repeater" tab of "Optional Setting". I'd suggest skipping this until you have manual roaming working.

4. If you have more than one Roaming Zone configured, make sure that the one you want is selected. This is a global radio setting not a per channel option like one would find on Motorola or Hytera.

5. Choose a digital channel. The digital contact for that channel should be statically configured on all the repeaters you configured in the roaming zone, otherwise you will likely confuse yourself.

6. Go to the Menu and under Roaming select "One time Roam". The radio will search for the repeater with the strongest repeater in the selected Roaming Zone. It will then temporarily use the TX, RX, CC (and time time slot if configured) of the Roaming Channel instead of the values on the current Digital Channel.

Ideally you want to be able to look at LastHeard on BrandMeister or the C-Bridge your repeaters are connected to. If not and you've never worked with roaming before then it will be very easy to get confused.

If you think of AnyTone DMR Roaming as simply "find the closest repeater" from a list you'll be off to a good start. If you have a group of repeaters that have the same static talk groups on the same time slots then things should work fairly well with just one (or a few) roaming zones. If you have several competing DMR organizations (think San Francisco South Bay) then you can easily end up with one or more roaming zones for each static talkgroup of interest.

Roaming isn't magic and it isn't very smart. It will happily roam to a repeater that doesn't carry the talkgroup that you want or to a repeater that is disconnected from the network if that's what you've configured in your radio.