DMR Open Standard

Digital Mobile Radio Association Open Standard

DMR is an international open digital radio standard recently developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It is the most widely deployed digital radio standard in the world, with it estimated as accounting for up to 75% of the market. Most radio manufacturers now have DMR products or advanced plans for DMR product releases.

This technology is a TDMA based standard which means the radio divides the frequency into time slots. With this standard it is two slots, and this has the benefit of allowing you greater efficiency from infrastructure and licensing as two different radio user groups can concurrently use a frequency.

The DMR standard reduces the risk associated with the deployment of two-way radio communications systems by providing access to a wide choice of independent vendors to keep your enterprise radio communication system running well into the future irrespective of what happens to your supplier arrangements. Competition amongst manufacturers creates a dynamic market fostering innovation and makes DMR a safe choice for business.  

 

The DMR standard is divided into three tiers:

• Tier I – basic radio-to-radio communications
• Tier II – Uses a repeater to extend coverage. Each channel has two slots effectively reducing infrastructure and licensing costs – this is a very common implementation.
• Tier III – This is a full control channel supported solution similar to P25 and Tetra. In the early part of 2013 this is not widely supported by manufacturers.

DMR supports backward compatibility to analog modes of operation, providing a migration to digital without a forklift upgrade. Advanced voice features are supported in the standard such as group call, which is ideal for announcements to multiple groups, one-to-one calling and text messaging.  Some features such as messaging will require a terminal with a display and full keypad. Private call capability is useful for restricting radio calls to specific people like a supervisor or a security guard when you don’t want them to broadcast over an open channel.

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At National Wireless we understand how large organisations work when considering new technologies and evaluating vendors.

We have partnered with some of Australia’s largest organisations on their journey toward improved radio communications delivering better business outcomes.