Category Archives: ALLstar

Yaesu DR-1X Repeater MultiMode Operation

Yaesu DR-1X Repeater MultiMode Operation.

The Yaesu DR-1X Repeater can be easily used for D-Star or DMR if you connect an MMDVM board to the rear accessories connector.

The Weston Repeater Group use four Yaesu DR1X’s as four of our five repeaters, and they work well and have done for years.
One is driven from a Wires-X HRI-200 and is used as our Fusion repeater, one is analogue FM on UHF, 2 are using MMDVM boards with no problem and run with Raspberry Pi 4’s, operating from Pi-Star SD cards.

Our fifth repeater is our DMR repeater which uses a Motorola DR-3000 repeater.

All five repeaters then share the same antenna, which is nice!

To get the audio in and out of the rear 15w high density accessory socket and by-pass the filtered audio path between the RX and TX you will have to put the repeater into remote mode by grounding the appropriate pin on the accessories 15w rear connector. This is pin 1, which must always remain grounded.
Then make sure to use the CTCSS input pin rather than the audio input pin.
The correct pin is pin 6 ‘TONE IN’

All the pin-outs are in the manual.

I selected wide FM rather than narrow FM on the DR-1X so that the modulation was perfect from the MMDVM board, even though you would have thought that narrow would have been more suitable.

I have been caught out with the ‘remote operation’ selection wire coming off of pin 1 before and it does make everything very confusing because it sort of sounds like the digital signals are going through the repeater and into the MMDVM correctly, but in fact they are never getting to the MMDVM board, they are simply passing internally through the DR1X!
All very annoying when these things catch you out.

Amazon do some really nice break out PCB’s with the 15w connectors on them if you tire of soldering the buckets of the standard connectors.

The most important settings to get right in the Pi-Star configuration is to set the TX and RX invert to 1.

Then you need to realise that the TX deviation is very critical, and wider than you would first imagine on DMR.

I have set our DR1x to wide deviation to get the best modulation, even though you would think that you must use narrow.

We use Pi-Star on our raspberry Pi’s which drive MMDVM boards.

If you are using different boards then you could find that your modulation sense is different to ours, and hence you will need to change the inversion settings.

Make sure that you have grounded pin 1 of the 15w socket on the rear of your repeater to put it into remote mode!

Make sure that as well as grounding pin 1 on the 15w rear socket of the repeater, do not use the AF IN pin 7 for your TX audio into the repeater. You must use pin 6 ‘TONE IN’ as this is the unfiltered audio input.
I hear of people using the AF IN pin all the time, but it will never work properly.

As far as RX audio goes, you obviously do not use the AF OUT pin 9, you must use the DISC OUT pin 8, which is unfiltered audio.

With the repeater set to wide FM rather than narrow FM it will all work perfectly.

On the touch screen of the repeater, you need to set the mode of the TX and RX to FM, rather than auto or digital.

You can force the repeater into this mode without touching the screen by setting pins 11 and 12 to the correct logic levels.

Pin 11 should be set low and pin 12 should set high to force the repeater into FM on TX and RX.

Unfortunately our 80m dipole is held up by a hilomast, which continuously lets us down.
If you are ever tempted to buy a hilomast, then please think again.
The design is very poor, and the cost of replacement gaskets is incredibly high.
SMC communications, South Midlands Communications has the monopoly on all the spares.
They charge £20 to post a small envelope containing the gaskets!
SMC couldn’t be more awkward or slow in dealing with our order.
Please do not buy a hilomast, as you will be left very disappointed!

Good luck.