Baofeng Baofeng DR-1801 unable to receive DMR transmissions

[jordoncloutier]

According to numerous posts across many radio-related forums, Baofeng's Quality Control is notoriously poor. Could be a bad internal antenna connection (SMA connections can be fragile) or even a board issue. Can you return or exchange the radio?

Being that the radio receives analog transmissions without any problems its highly doubtful that it is an antenna issue , Don't be so quick to bash baofeng just because its a Chinese radio . these little radios are an amazing bang for the buck no matter what . .

Our issue here is most likely a software/programming issue

 

[jordoncloutier]

I just received my programming cable , got the program downloaded and working , I've got a handful of local dmr frequencies added into the radio now and still no audio output when DMR is being broadcasted on those frequencies , No green light at the top either , however the Reception indicator in the upper left of the radio screen does come to life when DMR is being broadcasted . Very strange , I've quadruple checked all of the settings and cannot figure this out . I am very frustrated at this point , does anyone else have anything useful to add ?

 

[andrew90]

Ok, so I bought one of these - without reading this obviously - but I seem to have solved the problem on my example at least (Firmware revision A60V302.03).

So it seems the radio will not recieve DMR transmissions unless the transmit frquency is different to the receive frequency. Out of the box in VFO mode these frequencies are the same - hence no DMR receive.

Setting Menu -> Set -> Radio Cfg -> Shift Freq to some offset
and
Menu -> Set -> Radio Cfg -> Shift Dir to + or - will do this.

A couple of notes.

1) Again out of the box, Menu -> Set -> Radio Set -> 17 P2P Match and 18 Group Match are set to "off". This means the radio doesn't care about contacts, groups, receive lists, etc so there is no need to mess with these to receive transmissions.

2) You need to select the right slot to receive, Monitor Mode does not defeat this. To monitor two slots simultaneously you need to put the radio into dual watch mode with the same rx frequency in both VFOs but different slots.

3) Monitor mode enables the radio to ignore the colour code. This keeps switching itself off anytime you change anything so its worth programming the code, rather than using monitor mode, when you have discovered it.

Hope this helps. Once you get it working, the radio itself (other then the software) seems quite decent for the price (GBP31 deliverd to the UK from China 20% tax paid).

Cheers!

Andrew