Month: November 2020

Important Brandmeister Network Change!

In an effort to prevent hijacking of DMR IDs by unauthorized users, the USA Brandmeister team is rolling out Hotspot Security as a requirement. This will begin on November 30, 2020…but don’t wait. It will take a few minutes of reading and effort on your part to get it setup, but the entire DMR community benefits by restricting the network to authorized users only.

Hotspot Security establishes as password that all of your hotspots will use to logon to the Brandmeister DMR Master Server. This is different from the password that you use to logon to Brandmeister Self Care.

They’ve put together an excellent explanation of how to setup this up on the OpenSpot, Pi-Star and BlueDV platforms.

Kudos to Brandmeister for a good decision.

Connect to XLX as XLX!

Yes, you can connect to an XLX reflector with D-Star without having to use an XRF or DCS connect string! This is a supported feature of ircDDBGateway (which is leveraged by the Pi-Star distribution).

If you’re running a recent version of ircDDBGateway (such as the one in Pi-Star 4.1 releases), you can connect via an XLXnnnmL type command.

In this case nnn is the 3 digit reflector number and m is the module letter.

For example:

XLX020AL

ircddbgateway will then use DCS to make the connection to connect to module A of reflector XLX020.

For this to work properly, be certain that the following is set in your ircddbgateway config file:

xlxHostsFileUrl http://xlxapi.rlx.lu/api.php?do=GetXLXDMRMaster

You can check this in the Pi-Star expert mode configuration for ircDDBGateway.

73