The entire article smells, the mobile radio has a blank unpopulated circuit board and the portable is worse. The mobile picture is an unfinished/unpopulated KYDERA CDM-550 UHF DMR radio. KYDERA is a chicom, Chinese radio company, so nothing in this article is any of their original design. http://www.grapevineamateurradio.com/store/kyd-kydera-cdm-550-uhf-dmr-mobile-radio/ The portable radio picture is a combination of a smartphone display and the display from a Yaesu FTM-400DR system Fusion radio overlaid to look like they have something at this time. Yaesu and KYDERA really need to have them take these decietfull pictures out of these peoples concept article. http://www.yaesu.com/indexVS.cfm?cm...EFF8482F3367495319&DivisionID=65&isArchived=0
This is an interesting concept, but all it is, is a concept. Meanwhile, for those not aware, a group of hackers has already started doing some great mods on the Tytera MD-380. Early on, Travis Goodspeed thought this project might result in multimode utility. Although I haven't tried the newest firmware yet, in the past few weeks they've added the whole DMR-MARC user database, and some of the comments on the github page for md380tools suggests that they are building the tools needed to reverse engineer the hardware to do D-STAR, APRS, etc. I would bet a shiny nickle that Travis Goodspeed, Alex Denkt, and KK4CR get an actually-working multimode portable (modified MD-380), before either Connect Systems, or these NEWRADIO guys. And if I had to guess a date, probably before the end of 2016.
It's also my understanding (from following him on Twitter) that Travis is going to be at Dayton. Hopefully some other hams will join his project.
With google translate I have learned that NEWRADIO is an initiative funded by ÖVSV (Austrian Amateur Radio Society) the DARC (Germany) and the IARU Region 1 (Europe, Africa, Middle East & Northern Asia). It has been in the works for at least a year. Beyond that its hard to tell how far along it is. But since these same foreign hams came up with the DV4mini that can do multi modes, along with many other interesting projects, I have high hopes, and am sure they have made more progress than the Connect Systems guy.
It uses a C5000 (a DMR baseband IC with a lot of hardcoded parameters.) It’s probably impossible to use for other than TDMA DMR. The whole project is rather good though. They might be able to implement Codec2 on it, however
Quite frankly, the whole article smells like rotten fish. The company name is "New Radio" The pics of the mobile show a BLANK screen, the portable is a photoshop overlay of a smart phone on a Yaesu HT. The technology is CHINESE...it just smells fishy...I would hold your breath when reading anymore news about it on the internet until more information is gathered.
