DMR

Digital Mobile Radio, DMR, is a new standard that has been developed by ETSI defining digital standard for PMR. PMR, an acronym for Professional, Personal, or Private mobile radio is recognised as the term covering radio communications other than mobile telephones.

With the growing need to improve the efficiency of radio communications systems and add new facilities, the move to a digital system is of great interest to many users.

Accordingly the new Digital Mobile Radio communications system has been developed to provide affordable digital systems with low complexity with facilities for voice, data and other supplementary services.

Although the Digital Mobile Radio communications system has been defined by ETSI, a European organisation, it is being developed as a worldwide standard, which will have a similar take-up to previous analogue radio communications systems such as MPT 1327.

The resulting Digital Mobile Radio technology has been designed to deliver a cost-effective, highly functional communication system for professional mobile radio users, along with an easy upgrade path and multi-vendor interoperability and flexibility. It has been designed to operate within the existing 12.5 kHz channel spacing that is standard for PMR applications. It ahs also been designed to meet the future 6.25 kHz channel equivalence.

The Digital Mobile Radio communications standard has been developed to meet the requirements of many different classes of users. Those developing the standards have looked at the users of existing PMR radio communications systems. They concluded that these users fell broadly into three different categories:

  • Domestic and short range industrial users.

  • Professional users for which radio communications are vital.

  • Emergency services for which radio communications are mission critical.

  • In order to meet these needs the ETSI standard for Digital Mobile Radio provides for three different tiers of radio communications systems.

  • Tier 1

  • This is a basic licence free form of digital radio communications system.

  • Tier 2

  • This form of the Digital Mobile Radio communications system requires licensed operation and it offers high power levels, peer to peer operation as well as a repeater mode to provide greater coverage.

  • Tier 3

  • This tier of the Digital Mobile Radio communications standard again requires a licence and provides for trunked operation, thereby providing a digital form of the widely used MPT1327 standard.

The Digital Mobile Radio standard provides operation within the existing channel spacing used within the land mobile radio frequency allocations. It thereby provides an easy upgrade path for current users of analogue mobile radio technology.

DMR Association

The foundations for the DMR Association were laid in 2005 when a group of companies that were potential suppliers of DMR equipment signed a Memorandum of Understanding to
support ETSI in the establishment of Digital Mobile Radio as an open standard.

AA Radio Partners formed the majority of members in this original group; Icom, Kenwood, Motorola, Selex, Tait, andVertex Standard.

The standardisation work was undertaken such that the DMR standards were overseen by ETSI and the standards and themselves were issued by them.

In 2009, the original signatories of the original MOU set up the DMR Association with its aims to provide interoperability between Digital Mobile Radio vendors equipment and to provide information about the DMR standard.

Digital Mobile Radio technology offers users of Professional Mobile Radio systems the opportunity to upgrade their PMR systems from analogue to digital technology. As the DMR standard has been developed to facilitate the easy migration from analogue to digital, Digital Mobile Radio provides an ideal platform for many users.

For more information on DMR Contact AA Radio