The wonderful BrandMeister team added support for Talker Alias. Here is a link to learn more about Talker Alias support on BrandMeister.In brief, Talker Alias was added to the ETSI spec in 2016. It allows a radio to send its’ Radio Name over the network and have it displayed on receiving radios. This is a great feature that makes is easier to see the caller’s name without having to constantly update your contact list.

At this time Hytera radios and repeaters fully support this functionality. The MD-380 supports Talker Alias in the MD380Tools. Unfortunately Motorola does not support Talker Alias in their radios or repeaters.

An exciting area here is with hotspots. The OpenSpot and MMDVMHost based systems fully support Talker Alias.

For those of you with Hytera or TYT radios and a hotspot device you will get Talker Alias on your radio.

I’m using the ZUMspot and DVMega with MMDVMHost. I also have a borrowed Hytera PD782G.

Before getting into the details I wanted to show an example of what this looks like. I have two videos to show how this looks on the MMDVM Dashboard and on the radio.

<<insert videos here>>

You’ll see on the dashboard the complete alias seems to come in chunks. This is because it does arrive in pieces. It turns out there was only a few available bytes in the header. ETSI decided to sent talker alias in little chunks as each voice packet is sent. If a transmission is only a few seconds, you may not receive the entire string.

The original plan for Talker Alias was to have the transmitting radio send the radio name, this would be carried through the system and delivered to the receiving radio.

At this point you are probably asking how useful is this? Only Hytera radios support sending the Talker Alias. How often will I see something meaningful info?

It turns out it can be very useful. The BrandMeister team came up with a great plan. If the transmitting radio doesn’t send a radio name, the BrandMeister servers will create one. This is built using your call sign and your APRS Text (from Self Care).

From here, any time a voice data is sent to a repeater or hotspot that supports Talker Alias, Talker Alias is sent.

This means I can see Talker Alias for EVERYONE when I’m connected to my hotspot or an MMDVM-based repeater, providing it’s been turned on.

Repeaters that support Talker Alias are Hytera repeaters (v8 and above) and MMDVM-based hostspots / repeaters.

Radios supporting Talker Alias include Hyteras with (v8 and above) firmware and TYT radios running MD-380 Tools.

For MMDVM-based repeaters and hotspots you will need to turn off EmbeddedLCOnly, I also recommend turning off DumpTAData as it increases the size of the log files.