I don’t know the reasoning but it’s appearing all over the West coast and elsewhere. DMR user communities and repeater owners are dropping DMR-MARC and cBridge based networks for Brandmeister. Here are a few examples.
- DMR Phoenix It’s not just in the US, here’s a UK network moving.
- DMR-Utah
- Mountain West DMR
- Natural State Xperimenters
- NorCal DMR These guys have moved 50 repeaters!
- PAPA System
Here’s a list of some of the Brandmeister interconnections.
Here’s an interesting post that discusses the movement and the fragmentation that’s happening around all the digital modes. It seems just as things are growing, some people want to meddle, manage, control, interfere, moderate, direct, guide, take credit for, regulate, police, you name it. Feelings and personalities clash and some leave in disgust, some are asked to take sides, some wait and see… Personally I’d say change is inevitable and it’s an open market.
Some of the benefits of using Brandmeister appear to be:
- Open support for repeaters other than Motorola. Hotspots, Hytera and HomeBrew for example
- Support for location based services
- Bridging location data to APRS and DStar networks
- Ability to connect with radio dongles
- Ability to interface with DStar reflectors