I’ve spent the last few days — including one night where I just couldn’t sleep — where this problem was stuck in my craw, and I just couldn’t let it go.

I have a dual band DVMega. I’ve been curious about DMR, particularly since my local amateur radio club (KB5A) acquired a DMR repeater. So I figured that I’d set up my DVMega to handle all the digital voice modes. The following instructions set up your DVMega for all digital voice modes: DStar, DMR, and Yaesu System Fusion.

Alas, the problem is that this isn’t the most trivial of pursuits. After multiple attempts at failing to flash my SD card, here’s what worked — after making the appropriate solder connection between GPIO pin 7 (BCM layout pin 4, the fourth one from the SD card end on the inside) and the appropriate location on your DVMega (it’s different between the single band DVMegas and the dual band DVMega).

For dual-band users (like me), solder the wire like this (h/t G0WFV):

If you’re a single-band user, it should look like this (also credit to G0WFV):

The official instructions are WRONG. Soldering it to the pin shown in the official documentation will just send +5 volts to the reset capacitor. DO NOT DO THIS — IT IS WRONG. The correct pin is the fourth pin from the same end as the SD card slot (opposite the USB ports) on the INSIDE. (Interestingly, the DVMega site only has normal setup instructions for the Raspberry Pi in the correct official documentation but it’s only linked on the current production version, not on the beta version that you actually want to use, and it does not include any instructions about how flash the firmware.)

Now that you’ve got the hardware fixed (yes, this voids your warranty), you can move on to the software bits.

First, grab and unzip this image and copy it onto an SD card. It’s a 16GB image, not because it needs to be, but because that’s the smallest SD card I had handy. Shove it into your Raspberry Pi. It does have a copy of the 3.07 DVMega Beta for Raspberry Pi on it.

Second, you need to run the following commands:

sudo -sH

systemctl stop serial-getty@ttyAMA0.service

avrdude -p m328p -c arduino -P /dev/ttyAMA0 -b 115200 -F -U flash:w:DVMEGA_RH_V307_UNO.cpp.hex -v

You should get a bunch of info pertaining to flashing the DVMega.

After that, rewrite your SD card with KB5RAB’s YSF image. That will give you a full, all-mode MMDVMHost image. Configure it to use the frequency you want. I strongly recommend using a 70cm frequency. You need to configure everything to match. Your mmdvmhost.ini file, ircDDB configuration file, and whatever you have set on your radio need to match. What’s more, you need to program your radio for a downward (negative) split and a 0.000 MHz offset. I know that it’s dumb and makes no sense, but the MMDVMHost software just isn’t that smart.

After doing all of that, you should have a DVMega that works on all three major digital voice modes.