Eric, from HamRadioConcepts, shows just how easy it is to program the AnyTone 878 PLUS

Hello everyone, welcome back, KJ4YZI, HamRadioConcepts. BridgeCom contacted me and they said, "Hey Eric, we watch your videos on YouTube. You don't have too much on DMR. Can we invite you to check out something on DMR that a lot of people think is hot?" And I said, "I'm totally for that." And this is the AnyTone AT-D878UV PLUS. What is the first thing I need to do? Well, the first thing I need to do is figure out how the programming software works because that's going to be the easiest way to program this. You can program it right from the front of the radio. It is field programmable, but if you're talking about dumping in a whole code plug with 10,000 contacts or 10,000 different talk groups, you're going to want to do that from the software. The software is available free online. I'm going to download it now real quick and let's just take a look over the software and see what that would look like if you're programming in a radio. So in the past, DMR pushed a lot of people away because it was just so darn hard to get it working. There's still people to this day that say, "Oh, I bought this radio or that radio and I can't get it programmed, I'm having trouble." It is a little bit of a learning curve. But, when I look at the site here, because I'm going to go for the programming software, it seems that BridgeCom wants to make it easy for people to get on DMR. In fact, they even have packages, plug and play packages, download a code plug, support for different radios, even the DMR university. There's bundles right here with everything, with a hotspot and everything to go, and even have lessons down here. How to update the firmware, how to change the transmit power, stuff like that. They're trying to make it easy. In fact, so easy that they're saying, "This old guy right here can use a DMR." I think that's what the purpose of that is, but hey, more power, I love it. We're going to go to support and D878UV. There's some videos on here. I'm looking for the latest code plug software. We're going to download this, install it and get it running. First thing we always need to do on a programming software that I've ever touched, is set the COM port. Set COM port. Mine should be seven, yeah it should be seven. And then should go to program, make sure your radio's on. I did not install any drivers, Windows 10 automatically installed them when I plugged it in. So, we'll hit read from radio and it should ... yeah, we'll do digital contact list, there it goes. It should read. If you get an error, it's probably a COM port issue. So, what can we do? You can dump a whole code plug in here, and put all these different frequencies in and go through different zones. What I found on DMR is there's several different ways of programming it. For instance, if it was me, what I would do is I'd have zone one, would be local repeaters to me. Then zone two would be, probably, repeaters that I would hit on the way or traveling. Then zone three might be my hotspot. That's kind of how I would do it. But, I think people do it like zone one is, all the ones that have this talk group. Zone two is all ... I think there's different ways of doing it and that's why I really never made a DMR. I think I made one DMR programming video in the past and I got so many questions like, "Hey wait, somebody gave me this code plug and it looks different to what you did. And there's other guys on YouTube making the code plug videos. So, I chose to not really get into that. But, what I want to do right now is first, I need to set the radio ID of my radio. I need to put the radio ID in here. That's what's in there, we're going to put mine in. That's my radio ID and I'm going to call it KJ4YZI, sure, that should be my radio. Then if you have somebody else and you want to switch between Radio ID's, you can put different ID's in. So if your wife wants to use it or your kid, you can just switch over. I guess the name should be Eric, right? We'll just call it Eric. There we go. So, that's that. And then next, we need to go to ... we have one zone here with eight channels in there, and those are the eight channels. I'm going to use this right now just to play with. We're going to do this, we're going to make this first one, we're going to call it KJ4YZ, that's the name of the local repeater, it's not my repeater, it's in Indian River County. We're going to do channel type, digital. The receive frequency is 444.350. Remember, I remember all of these on the top of my head because I hardly ever program radios. 449.35000, and bandwidth, I guess that'd be 12 and a half. Radio ID is set for me. Color code one. We're going to do slot two, and I just want to get a couple done so I can listen to something and make a contact here. So we're going to call that one.