SkyBridge Plus
Overview
The BridgeCom SkyBridge Plus is the turnkey commercial DMR hotspot in this lineup — a small Raspberry Pi Zero W / MMDVM-hat appliance assembled in a BridgeCom-branded enclosure, factory-flashed with a customised WPSD (W0CHP-PiStar-Dash) image, with a 0.96" OLED status display and a single-port SMA antenna jack. It earns the bench slot as the set-and-forget DMR hotspot: pre-configured at the factory, sold as a complete unit with US distributor support and warranty, no soldering, no firmware compile, no Pi-flash. It is the always-on home-base counterpart to the hand-built DIY WPSD hotspot. This deep dive covers the hardware, the MMDVM mode envelope, the web-managed configuration workflow, network-config backup discipline, and on-air network use. Migrated from the Scanners project as part of the Scanners/Radios restructure Stage 2 Phase 2 (2026-06-16).
Context
The SkyBridge runs the same upstream open-source MMDVM stack (MMDVMHost / DMRGateway / the per-mode gateway family) as any Pi-Star/WPSD derivative, bridging the AnyTone D878's low-power UHF DMR signal to BrandMeister, TGIF, W0CHP, and the FCS/XLX reflector ecosystem over the internet. The appliance tradeoff against the DIY WPSD build is reliability and US-vendor support in exchange for a price premium (~USD 230-280 mid-2026) and a conservative firmware cadence that lags upstream WPSD by weeks. It is Wi-Fi-only (no Ethernet), which is the most common failure mode, and is run as a simplex hotspot partitioned from the DIY WPSD unit on a different frequency and network.
