I am retired and I have spent most of 3 days working on this radio. I really wanted to learn DMR. I haven't learned anything on DMR yet as everything I have done was learning the radio. As a retired IT person, I soon realized that a "CodePlug" was just a small database containing your radio settings and freqs. After playing around I came up with a plan to help figure out the radio freq assigments. Using a spreadsheet program  (Excel), enter all your frequencies into a list and organize them into groups. I made the following groups:, "Analog Repeaters", "Digital Repeaters", "Analog Simplex", "Weather" (Yes you can add NOAA channels), and "Scanner"; then organized all freq under these groups. These group names then become your "Zones". Then load all your freqs into the channel tab, go to Zones tab, create each zone and select each freq for the appropriate zone, and you are almost ready to load these settings (your CodePlug) into the radio.

DMR requires a few more steps. Talks groups were a little more confusing. I had 3 local talk groups I wanted to join and with the radio you have to add the SAME freq into the radio, each with a different talk group assigned, into the radio. For example, I wanted to be on my state talk group (MO), local talk group (Columbia, MO) and the state ARES group, I needed 3 channels setup. Confusing at first.

The Bridgestone University courses are pretty good, but sometimes confusing. Most of the videos are on Youtube. Instead of being an organized course, they are a collection of videos put in somewhat of an order.

73, Bob,N6VZO