Yesterday 12 of our members turned out to support the 17 mile Ashgate Hospice High Peak Trail charity walk. We provided event communications over the 17 mile stretch of the High Peak Trail.

On our offline DMR logging, tracking and recording project there has been further cleaning of the software and a small architecture change over the last month, slightly delayed due to dependency changes in the app used to view the data.

We are pleased to announce that Derby Raynet now has a public Facebook group. This is part of our push to attract new members, and to make public announcements easier to share.

Tonight we held our first club meeting of 2026 at the museum. Topics discussed included:

• Plans to encourage new members who are able to either help behind the scenes, or support at events.
• Non-charity events we could take part in such as Museums on-the-air.
• Next steps to purchase a second DMR repeater that can be linked to our existing repeater in order to improve coverage at our annual High Peak Trail walk.

As mentioned before we have been working to fully integrate DMR position, messaging and audio into a single logging solution for Derby Raynet Control to use during events without needing any complex infrastructure or being dependent on the Internet.

Since the last update we have overcome most of our issues and are now working on reliability and scaling improvements.

Previously we could “listen” to the repeater over RF at control and decode the data side of DMR (messages, position reports and on air caller information), we have recently made progress in a number of areas in order to add audio recording and searching capability.

Using Digital APRS data to find coverage problems

During the Ashgate Sparkle event last month our Sweep walker was sending position beacons at a fixed interval over our portable DMR repeater, with this data being recorded at control.

Since these position reports where received on our regular repeater channel instead of via a different mode and band we can use this as a repeater coverage indicator. Using a new update to the Event Comms application we have been able to generate real coverage stats for our repeaters coverage.

Derby Raynet again supported Ashgate Hospice with their very popular Sparkle Walk. This is always an interesting event with it involving a large number of participants and being overnight.

Due to the road closures we arrived at about 17:00 on the Saturday, and left a little before 03:00 the following morning.

There was a record number of walkers this year with 3500 all starting at the same time.

Derby Raynet has been using a DMR repeater for a few events now. This has improved clarity in noisy control environments and having a second time slot available when more privacy is required is a great advantage. However, we have not been making use of the additional digital features available.

It is common to share APRS like information (position and SMS style messages) over Internet linked DMR repeaters through one of the networks. The networks convert this data, and send it to APRS-IS, which can then be easily viewed on a map. For emergency scenarios or charity events in isolated areas we aim to create our own independent networks to provide redundancy when possible, so try to avoid relying on this.

As part of our efforts to gain new members we have created this new website to tell people who we are, and what we do.

If you would like to find out more about what you see here then contact us via the About page. We are happy to help in many ways including providing communications for local charities, as well as helping people get involved with Amateur Radio.

Did you know that Amateur Radio is not just for talking to people around the world with big aerials, but is also a great means to provide backups comms in areas with patchy mobile phone signals, such as when walking or for charity events in the Peak District. The Foundation licenses are an ideal entry into Amateur Radio for people with no radio experience.

On behalf of Ashgate Hospice we provided communication links between the finish area and most checkpoints along a 17 mile section of the High Peak Trail.

As usual there were three walks of 3.5, 11 and 17 miles, each with bus drop-offs along the route.

During the event we used our new logging software again, this time on a Chromebook and using DMR APRS in addition to the previously trialed Analogue APRS, we successfully followed our 11 mile sweep around most of the course and as this was all via our repeater we gained some very useful repeater coverage information.