My Opinion

INHO DMR is an answer to a question nobody asked. It's very, very expensive, it's radios are only available in single band configuration at a time when a majority of new radios sold are at least dual banders and they have no amateur radio embellishments that are built in like D-Star. Both technologies use the AMBE vocoder and thus have to pay license fees to Digital Voice Systems, Inc., who holds the patent, and that's what keeps the cost high. The D-Star protocol was developed as an open standard by the Japan Amateur Radio League (JARL) and as such, is much more in tune to what hams want in a radio system. Because DMR systems are marketed solely as commercial systems, they have almost nothing of such embellishments and such things are add-ons and modifications designed by various amateur groups that must be added to TDMA radios. D-Star has most of such things already, for about the same cost as the single band DMR radios. So why spend about the same amount for a radio that only does a small portion of what D-Star already does? With D-Star you can talk to hams in Nigeria. You can't do that with DMR.