I never had much interest in DMR but my friend sent me an Amazon link for a DMR radio for $20 so I couldn’t resist. It’s $40 now though, not sure it’s worth that much. The brand is “Cotre”, it’s chinese, there’s no manual and it doesn’t have a display. jhart99 has done a good job of documenting programming the radio on his website https://jhart99.com/co01d-programming/ You can program it with a Baofeng cable, as long as it doesn’t use the Prolific USB-to-Serial chipset(I had one cable with this chipset but luckily found another that worked with the CH340 chip)
I couldn’t hit the local DMR repeater from my house so the radio doesn’t do anything special without a repeater. So I went on ebay and bought a MMDVM Hot spot for $27 and a Raspberry PI Zero W for $14 delivered. For a total of $61 to get on DMR. This is much cheaper than the other options that are well over $200 (AnyTone radio’s seem to be the most popular).
The hot spot comes as a kit so there’s some soldering but it’s not difficult. Configuring the Hot Spot took about 2 hours since I’ve never done it before. You need to send your FCC license to radioid.net to get a Radio ID and then I registered the hot spot with the Brandmeister Network. It connects via WiFi and has a web interface for configuring it. Issues I had configuring it were changing the modem(serial interface between the hotspot board and the Pi) to ttyAMA0 and it didn’t work on the Brandmeister US gateway, I used the Canada gateway instead. Here’s the hotspot dashboard:
It’s an interesting project but I keep feeling like you could just add a mic/speaker interface on the hot spot webpage and it wouldn’t be ham radio at all. But for $61 it was enjoyable to play around with. I see that it has a POCSAG capability for pager networks. I’m not sure if I still have my old beeper but I might look to pick one up and try that out at some point.