How to set up the Tait DMR Tier 2 Node

Iain Scott and Evan walking through Node DMR tier 2 setupIn this video Iain Scott, Senior Design Engineer and Evan Forester, Content Marketing Manager will take you through setting up a Tait DMR Tier 2 Node.

Our DMR products have been developed in conjunction with standards defined by the DMR Association, ensuring interoperability with other DMR equipment and opportunities for multi-vendor solutions with standardized interfaces.

Visit the product section on our website for more information about Tait DMR Tier 2 and 3

Watch how to setup a Tait DMR Tier 2 Node

If you have any suggestions for other videos or general questions for Evan or Iain please leave a comment below.

You can also watch the other DMR videos in this series:

Video Transcript

Evan: Okay, so in just a moment we’re going to learn how to configure a node, but before we do I thought it would be helpful to just get a look at what it actually looks like. So right here, Iain, what is this little box?

Iain: This our Tier 2 node. This is brand new for us. A lot of people have been worried about having to have a big Solaris box, which is what we have in our DMR Tier 3 and MPT-IP, having a big server. But this one is designed to be small. It’s quiet, there’s no fan inside of it. It’s all solid state, it doesn’t heat up. It’s a great little box and it costs a fraction of our other nodes.

Evan: Oh, great.

Iain: All the things people have been worried about should go away. Now, this thing, you could sit on your desk in the central office. It doesn’t have to be rack mounted, so there’s lots of advantages to it.

Evan: Okay. Let’s go look at how to configure it. So as you can see up on the screen here, we are looking at a serious warning. So, Iain, if I want to access the DMR Tier 2 node, how would I do that?

Iain: So basically all you have to do is type in the IP address of the node into your browser and suddenly you can use it. Now, as you can see, it tells people that shouldn’t be using it to go away, but for us we’re going to head into the node. Now, with all our systems you do have to have a username and a login.

So I’ve already set that up for the system. It’s as simple as doing this and now we’re into the node. So this is your normal screen that you get when you enter a node. You can basically see the status of the system, so at the moment we’ve got some alarms. This is because some of the consoles that was working on the system has been taken away. We had some demo consoles running on our system. You can see we’ve now got nodes and sites are up and working.

Evan: So let’s say I wanted to add another site onto the network. How would I do that using this interface?

Iain: You just click on the site and now we’re at the site screen. So this gives you all the configuration for the site. The first thing you need to do is add some channels to the site. I’m just going to add some channels here. I don’t actually have a base station to use, so I’ll just pretend to use one at the moment. It’s pretty much as simple as this. The second part of this is all channels you assign a group to. Okay, so this is this other one.

You’ll see it’s got two channel groups here, 127 and 125. If we wanted to hook this channel up on the first site to the site we just created, go back to the other site we’d assign this channel by editing it. 127… And now any radio talking on this channel at this site should be heard by radios on the channel at the other site.

Evan: All right, so next question. If I wanted to activate an AIS connection to a console, how would I do that?

Iain: The step to activate a console, we’ll look down here at what we have. It sits on a telephony because all consoles are using SIP, and that’s what we use to connect to the telephone, so in a way, to us, a console is almost like a phone connection.

So you can see here we’ve got three consoles already connected to the system. Each console you see is assigned a channel group, so once again, this is the same channel group we used on the site. So basically we can add another one, we might want to add another console. John’s Console. We say we also want that guy to be on channel group 127.

Now, with SIP there’s several different ways you can assign connections. So we’re saying this is an AIS connection, so AIS is our protocol we use to talk to consoles. That’s a DMR standard, so you should be able to use quite a few different vendors. Now, in order to allow them to access our system, we basically have to give them a username and a password.

So, some sort of username, some sort of password. That’s what they use when they hook up their console to our system or send a message with this username or password telling us who they are, and why that we know, and they’re allowed to use that system. That’s basically all you have to do to add a console.

Evan: Okay. And then if you want to save the configuration of the node, how do we save it, the configuration?

Iain: Under files, come down here and look at backups. Now by default the node will back up a file into its own file system every day, so we always have a backup there in case something goes wrong. You should be able to restore, but if you want to save one to your own folder you can go up here and go backup, and it’ll generate one. So this is one that’s the latest, everything you’ve got. If you scroll down here, here’s his file saved there.

Now if we click on that, you can save it to your computer and it’s that easy. You can also, if you go back, you can also restore. So you can upload a file from your computer, you’d go upload, select the file you wanted, which we didn’t save before. Select a file, it’ll load it onto here and then it’s sort of two steps. One is to load it onto the node, the second one select it, and then you just click backup and that will restore the old database.

Evan: Okay. And then last question, how do I properly end my session working on this node?

Iain: So this is pretty simple. Go to log out, are you sure you want to log out? Yep. And there you go, you’re back to the…

Evan: Okay. Thank you again, Iain. And that’s all we have for now.

 

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