As more and more users of digital voice amateur radio shift towards hot spot devices instead of local repeaters, it gets hard to find where people in your area are using DMR.
Since hotspots have such limited range, you would not likely be able to hear them "over the air" and there is not really any way to simply "scan the band" looking for activity like one may do on 2m or 80m. So, how do you find DMR activity?
DMR: Get Predictive
Is this suggestion cheating? Not really. There is a way you can use one of the many somewhat hidden analytic tools to find out what talk groups are most active and when. This will help you learn when and where to spend time "lurking" since there are 1,439 officially set aside talk groups according to this nice Pi-Star DMR BrandMeister Talk Group page.
Using talk group 31630 (STEM) as an example, the chart below is predictive in the sense that every Tuesday evening at 20:00 hours Eastern US time, is a big spike of activity for a little over an hour. This is when the Northstar Digital Net takes place.
Another example on when you may find activity if you are traveling in the state of Louisiana is shown below by looking at talk group 3122.
How about if you want to feel really special and have "Nationwide US" all to your self with fewer people constantly asking for a radio check or signal report? 06:00 AM Eastern US may just be the time for you to sit on talk group 3100.
Where do you get these charts?
Here is where to go and find some possibly interesting talk groups and times to see what sort of activity is taking place. https://brandmeister.network/?page=callstats
And now you know how to find the best of the best on DMR.
Thanks man.. this is very helpful!
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