NEW - Motorola DLR series - rugged, licence-free, high-quality digital radios

Motorola swears there isn’t a way to update them. Their stance is that it was an intended feature that was never actually introduced. I just don’t think those I’ve spoken to know what the heck I’m talking about.

My radios are 2016 builds, so I’m almost wondering if there was some unpublished small hardware revision at some point that made this possible?

Would be interesting to hear from others that have done the update to see ages on their radios.

I learned of the more than 6 channel capability by trying to add more than 6 channels and it worked until I tried to add an 11th channel. Then I saw the maximum number of channels supported by the model at the top of the main page on the CPS was 10 channels. Duh. Then I checked what a factory default profile shows for max channels and it was 10. I then looked at a factory default DLR1060 profile showed when using R05.00 CPS and it showed 6 channels. Hmmmm…OK so when did the change occur?

I looked at the release notes for each CPS version and found the 10 channel capability in the DLR1060 model started with R05.01 CPS. OK that checks out because I was using R06.00 CPS at the time.

It looks like a change was made in the radio sometime in 2017. My first pair of DLR1060s I owned back in 2015 were programmed using R05.00 CPS so 10 channel capability didn’t exist back then.

Your 2016 built radios may be like the 2015 built radios I had. I never tried to update those because I sold them in early 2017. I suspect the amount of memory available to use for programming was increased, probably because an older memory part went end of life and was replaced by an equivalent part with a lot more memory. It’s most likely done on a single DSP chip and the chip manufacturer updated the part. The software team probably said “Oh good…now we can add more channels!” Word of the upgrade might not have been communicated to the marketing team.

The people you talked to might be operating on old information.

How do I get hold of the DLR product team?

I want to push them to add automatic gain control (AGC) to the DLR transmit audio to clean them up. The DTR600/700 have the best audio thanks to AGC in the transmit audio. You can talk a couple of inches away from a DTR600/700 radio or practically eat the front of the radio and the audio sounds about the same. Talking loudly doesn’t hurt it either. The DTR600/700 handles people talking loudly or climbing up on the mic, and also when talking loudly AND climbing up on the mic. The DLRs will transmit VERY BADLY distorted audio if you do this with a DLR and makes other radios sound like they want to pop out of their enclosure. The difference in transmitted audio quality between the DTR600/700 and DLRs is night and day. The default mic gain setting was used in all radios in my testing. The legacy DTR410/550/650 don’t have AGC in the transmit audio but process the audio better than the DLRs do. The DTR600/700 have the best audio, the DLRs have the worst audio, and the legacy DTR410/550/650 models are somewhere in between.

I don’t have a direct line. I just called the business radio support line @ 1.800.448.6686

Welp, kudos to Motorola. They’ve escalated the case to engineering. They have found that the very early DLR1060s can’t be upgraded to 10 channels. Any with firmware / codeplug version R01.00 can’t take 10 channels. Any with FW/CP R01.01 should be able to. My radios are R01.01, so they can’t explain why it doesn’t work.

Will update when I hear an answer.

AGC was mentioned toward the end but what about companding?
Sure, there is no RF hiss, but what about engines, air conditioners, barking dogs, and people making noise various noises.