DMR Roaming

Since I spend a lot of time driving between Berkshires to Long Island to North Central Connecticut I have been spending some time experimenting with DMR Roaming. I already had a partial CT State Wide setup with complete Zones for each repeater. My original Roaming Code Plug is very comprehensive for each site loaded, but did not have all of the available CT ARES Repeaters. It is a sizable cqodeplug. The cool thing is that for age areas, I can simply turn on my XPR4550 or XPR6550 and it will automatically find a usable repeater.

The recent changes are tailored to a simpler single talk group roam from a channel pool instead of a repeater specific  zone. This way, the same channel can be re-used my multiple roaming lists. The initial roam channel is named a specific interstate or state route.

Thus, in one 16 channel Zone I get 16 different driving routes with 16 roaming groups drawing from a channel pool without building a complete zone per route.

Still tuning this, but it seems the programming efforts may be reduced by 80-90%.

-UPDATE 9/9/20

It works! This method seems to greatly reduce the programming tasks. I have a ROAM Zone with multiple driving routes. Thus, I simply select the channel which uses a certain number of the pooled repeater configurations needed for that road. For the hilly terrain in CT I believe I have to reduce the switch-over sensitivity from -108db usually used. In CT a repeater my be momentarily strong enough to satisfy the requirements. Next experiment will be -102db to see if this will reduce the hunt.