M17 Project

Well, if I don' have enough already to play with, I have dove into the M17 Project to see how things are progressing. If you want to learn more about M17 please visit their page here. 

       I got an email for Jerry at Connect Systems that he had a sale on some used CS7000-M17 Plus radios for $199. I had looked that these before the the price point was not where I wanted it to be. At this new lower price I could not resist the option to give it a try. The radio arrived and even though it was a used radio it looked brand new. Jerry had already loaded the latest firmware so I was ready to go. The radio will currently run DMR, M17 and analog. It arrived in M17 mode and you have to boot into the mode you want to use. I called Jerry and he showed me how to boot between modes. He referred to it as a dual boot radio. Much like being able to boot between different OS on a computer. I will share what I have learned so you can bypass the issues I had getting started.  Here is how you boot into the two modes.

        The first thing is how do I program the radio? Well for M17 you don't have a CPS to program the radio. Currently there is only a VFO mode and you hand program the radio. For DMR you can download the CPS from the Connect Systems site.   Here

Secondly, I ran into issued not being able to add 25 Khz spacing for my analog channels in DMR mode. Once again Jerry informed me how to fix this. It's actually a very easy process. You just need to modify the shortcut on your desktop and then relaunch the CPS. You will need to add a -K at he end of the target in the shortcut.  Mine looks like this after being modified  C:\Program Files (x86)\CONNECT_SYSTEMS\CSI CS7000-M17 PLUS CPS\CPS.exe" -K  See the screenshot below. 

     The third thing I had to do was update the firmware on my MMDVM hat (Thanks to Nick KF5CJG). I currently use the cheaper Chinese hat from eBay, You have to be running version 1.6.1 for the M17 to work. You will be able to see on the dashboard that that the hotspot is transmitting but nothing comes out of the hat or can be received by it until you do the firmware update. I followed the video from M0FXB.  To upgrade my simplex hat I opened an SSH session to my pi-star. After I was into my pi-star software command line I ran the command sudo pistar-modemupgrade hs_hat After this my hat was able to transmit and receive M17.  

     After playing with the radio and my hotspot for a few days I have noticed several issues with the audio. I call these pop and high pitch squeals. I posted in the M17 Users Groups io and some suggestions were made on adjusting the levels on the hospot. I made the adjustments and didn't really notice much of a change. I talked with Nick KF5CJG and we went to his M17 reflector  (M17-517) and did some testing. I had recently purchased a duplex hotspot hat but hand not put it into service just yet. I did have to update the firmware to V1.6.1. After updating the hat and putting it into duplex mode we tested further. We noticed that the audio issues I had on the simplex board were still there but much less and several times we had clean transmission. Well what does this mean?  It appears the quality of the hat may be part of the issue with the audio that I was seeing.  Your result may vary but this is what we noticed during this test. I hope this helps some of you get started on M17.