Friday, April 10, 2015

Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am excited to announce that we have invested in a new C-Bridge for use by the Hoosier DMR organization. We were notified earlier this week that DMR-MARC was going to drop the TAC-310 and TAC-311 talkgroups from their C-Bridge we were operating through in Schaumburg and felt that this was a necessary move to accommodate to our user base to keep those talk-groups available.
After some discussions, we called BridgeCom Systems Wednesday morning and purchased the Hoosier DMR C-Bridge and had it programmed up and in operation the same afternoon. It is being hosted "on the cloud" in a very large data center in Indianapolis with top of line servers and redundant internet. You probably haven't even noticed any changes on your end! We have been operating on the new Hoosier DMR C-Bridge since approximately 3:00 Wednesday afternoon. The only change you will notice immediately is the fact that our traffic is visible in real time again on www.dmr.watch.
We were also able to secure the Indiana 3118 Statewide talkgroup to our c-bridge so the Tuesday night information net will continue!
We would like to eventually make each repeater’s local talkgroup a true local talkgroup. All other talkgroups will remain the same and there will be no unnecessary re-programming of user radios. The only programming users will need to do at this point is add the new talkgroups that are available if they wish. The new talkgroups that are available are as follows:
“The Parrot” is now available on Time Slot 1 Talkgroup 9998
DMR-MARC’s “UA English 1” is now available on Time Slot 1 Talkgroup 113
DMR-MARC’s “UA English 2” is now available on Time Slot 2 Talkgroup 123
We may also add a "zone" talkgroup for Indiana North, Central and South, to provide intra-comms within a specified zone, but that is still up in the air.
If any of you have questions about this change, please feel free to contact us. Communication among the repeater trustees and users is key and everyone’s feedback and input is valued. This is a team effort and we need to keep it that way to ensure we have the strongest DMR network possible.
We would like to thank each and every one of you for your patience during the recent growing pains that the network has seen. It’s sad to see that the Indiana DMR network got separated by some, but yet it’s even more encouraging to see that we are going stronger than ever! Now that Hoosier DMR doesn't have to rely on others for C-Bridge connectivity, we can rest assured that our network will remain stable and configured as efficiently as possible
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Also, If you know of clubs or repeater trustees that would like to add DMR in their area, please let Steve or I know. We would be more than happy to help them get DMR off the ground in their area. With the addition of our own C-Bridge we can add as many new repeaters as needed! We even have enough room to add any of the Indiana DMR repeaters that would like to get back on board with the DMR-MARC/Hoosier DMR team.
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Your Hoosier DMR admin team