Echo, Unlink, Status — The DMR Service Numbers

Echo, Unlink, Status — The Service Numbers

Some of the numbers you dial into a DMR radio are not places. They are services — small programs running on the master server that answer when you call them. They are the closest thing DMR has to a command line, and every one of them works from the radio, with no computer and no dashboard.

The most useful of them, and the first one every newcomer should learn, is Echo.

Echo — hearing yourself as the network hears you

Also called Parrot. Key up, talk for a few seconds, release, and the server plays your own transmission back to you. That is the whole feature, and it is worth more than it sounds.

What Echo actually proves, in one press of the PTT:

Your radio is hitting the repeater or hotspot
The repeater or hotspot is connected to the network
Your DMR ID is registered and accepted — an unregistered ID gets nothing back
Your microphone gain is sane, and you can hear exactly how you sound to everyone else

That last one is the part hams skip. Nobody on a talkgroup is going to tell you that you are over-deviated, muffled, or clipping — they will just quietly find you hard to copy. Echo tells you in ten seconds, and it tells you privately.

The number-one reason Echo “doesn’t work.” On BrandMeister, Echo is 9990 as a Private Call — not a talkgroup. Program it as a group call and you will key up, hear nothing, and conclude the repeater is broken. Because it is a private call, it never subscribes the repeater to a talkgroup, which is also why it works happily on either timeslot.

BrandMeister also runs a per-master echo at xxx997, where xxx is the MCC of the master you are connected to — 310997 for a US master, for example. Playback is capped at ninety seconds by default, which is ninety seconds longer than anyone should test for.

The rest of the service numbers

Number	Call type	What it does
9990	Private	Echo / Parrot on BrandMeister. Records you and plays it straight back.
9990 or 31000	Either — group or private	Echo / Parrot on TGIF. Both numbers work, and TGIF accepts either call type. Only your own hotspot hears the playback.
9998	Group	Echo on the TRBO-style networks. Different number, different call type, same idea.
4000	Private or group, depending on radio	Unlink. On BrandMeister, drops the dynamic talkgroups your hotspot or repeater has picked up, and answers with a spoken confirmation. On TGIF it does something else entirely — see below.
5000	Private	Status. The server tells you, out loud, what you are currently linked to.
9	Group	Local. Not a service so much as a convention — traffic that stays on the repeater and goes no further.

4000 will lie to you. Send 4000, get the cheerful “un-linked” announcement, and then keep hearing the talkgroup anyway. This is not a bug. 4000 drops dynamic talkgroups — ones your radio pulled in by keying up. A talkgroup set as static on your network self-care page is not dynamic, so it comes straight back a few seconds later, exactly as configured. To be rid of a static talkgroup you have to remove it on the dashboard. The radio cannot do it for you, no matter how many times you send 4000.

TGIF treats 4000 differently. On TGIF you never need a 4000 to change talkgroups — you simply key up on the new one, and the last talkgroup you keyed is where you are parked. TGIF’s 4000 carries no traffic at all. It is a parking spot: a place to leave the radio when you want to hear nothing. Same number as BrandMeister’s unlink, entirely different job.

Why the numbers are different everywhere

Line the three networks up and the pattern is hard to miss. Echo is 9990, private call on BrandMeister. It is 9998, group call on the TRBO-style networks — and on that family, the channel’s DMR mode must be set to Repeater rather than Simplex or the call goes nowhere. On TGIF it is 9990 or 31000, and TGIF does not care which call type you use. Same service. Same purpose. Three networks, three answers.

The 4000 story is stranger still. The same four digits mean drop my dynamic talkgroups on one network and park me somewhere silent on another.

This is the clearest small illustration of something that catches everyone eventually: a DMR codeplug is written against a network, not against the mode. Import a friend’s codeplug from a different network and the voice traffic may work fine while every service number silently fails — or worse, quietly does something you did not intend. When a service number does nothing, check the network before you check the radio — and check the current documentation for that network rather than a forum post from four years ago, because these assignments do change.