Mission

DPCN’s mission is to provide advanced infrastructure support to amateur radio organizations and individuals.

We accomplish this through:

• Experimentation: Our networks are testbeds for the latest digital radio technologies.

• Education: Interested hams are encouraged to volunteer and gain real world experience in digital radio systems design, management, and maintenance.

Why DPCN

DPCN compliments current DMR networks by addressing some technical limitations:

• DPCN focuses on simplicity. By using commercial gear, hams can focus on the everyday use of their radios instead of having to interact with a complicated and confusing user interface.

• DPCN uses trunking, the dynamic allocation of repeater timeslots. This allows more hams to talk at once than with conventional systems.

• DPCN encourages private calling. Most everyday ham radio communications are one-on-one personal conversations, which needn’t consume a timeslot on every linked repeater. DPCN systems only use the repeaters that the private calling radios are talking on, not the entire system.

• DPCN can offload routine traffic from mission critical systems, keeping them free for emergency and priority traffic during incidents and events.

• DPCN keeps the network local. DPCN systems typically do not link with global DMR networks.¹ DPCN’s purpose is to serve local ham communities first and to provide modern infrastructure where it’s most needed: shared regional linked repeater systems that can accommodate many different clubs, associations, and users without interfering with each other.

• DPCN provides logical infrastructure in addition to physical infrastructure, decoupling the two. Until now, the two have been the same. Instead of setting up a new single-use repeater for a club, get a dedicated talkgroup on DPCN.

• DPCN uses centralized management for radio codeplugs. This relieves operators from having to spend hours programming their DMR radios. Modern digital commercial radio systems are designed for centralized management; updates are pushed out over the air.

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