Part of our Getting On The Air: Modes, Operations, and Making Contacts guide.
I ran Pi-Star for a long time before switching over, and now every hotspot I own runs WPSD. Both projects do the same underlying job, but a couple years of running both back to back has made the differences pretty clear to me. If you’re deciding which one to put on your next hotspot build, or wondering whether it’s worth migrating an existing one, here’s how I’d break it down.
How They’re The Same
At the core, Pi-Star and WPSD are both complete hotspot operating systems built around the same MMDVMHost and DMRGateway software stack. That’s the part that actually talks to your MMDVM modem board and routes traffic out to the DMR networks. Because they share that same foundation, the concepts transfer directly between them: callsign, DMR ID, color code, hotspot frequency, and network selection all mean exactly the same thing regardless of which one you’re running. Both flash to a microSD card, both boot up a self-hosted web dashboard for configuration, and both support the same multi-mode alphabet soup: DMR, D-STAR, YSF, P25, NXDN, if your hardware supports it, either software can drive it. If you know how to configure one, you already know how to configure the other. Nothing about switching requires relearning DMR itself.
How They’re Different
The difference that actually matters is development pace. Pi-Star is the older project, and it’s the one that built most of the hobby’s hotspot tutorials and troubleshooting culture, but active development has slowed way down. WPSD is a more actively maintained continuation of that same idea, and it shows in day-to-day use. The dashboard feels more modern and responds faster. Firmware and dependency updates come more frequently. Newer MMDVM hardware tends to get supported sooner. And WPSD has leaned harder into multi-hotspot and multi-network management, which is exactly the thing that pushed me to switch in the first place.
Running Brandmeister and TGIF side by side through DMRGateway works on both, but WPSD’s dashboard makes juggling multiple networks and, in my case, multiple physical hotspots, noticeably less fiddly. I’m not digging through log files or SSHing in nearly as often as I used to on Pi-Star. It’s the difference between software that mostly works and software that’s actively being sanded down.
Hardware Requirements
This is the one area where the two are essentially identical, which is part of why switching is so low-risk. Both run comfortably on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for a single-user hotspot, and both scale up fine to a Pi 3 or Pi 4 if you want more headroom or you’re running a busier setup. Either software needs an MMDVM modem hat (Jumbospot, Zumspot, DVmega, and similar boards all work), a microSD card (16 GB is plenty for either), a stable 5V power supply, and a small UHF antenna. Simplex versus duplex hat is a decision about your use case, not your software, and it works the same way on both. If you’ve already got a working Pi-Star hotspot built, you already own everything you need to run WPSD instead. Nothing about the hardware side forces the choice one way or the other.
Why Choose One Over The Other
If you’re building your first hotspot today, I’d point you at WPSD without much hesitation. It’s the actively developed option, it handles multi-network setups more gracefully, and it’s what I run exclusively across every hotspot I own at this point. The only real case for Pi-Star is if you’re following an older tutorial step by step and don’t want the interface to look different from the screenshots, or if you’ve already got a Pi-Star hotspot running fine and see no reason to touch it. Neither is a bad choice technically, they’re both built on the same reliable engine, but if you want the one that’s still moving forward, that’s WPSD. Flashing a fresh image and re-entering your callsign, DMR ID, and frequency takes maybe twenty minutes, so the switch itself is a lot less intimidating than it sounds.
For the full build from scratch, hardware selection through getting your radio talking to the hotspot, see Building a DMR Hotspot with a Raspberry Pi. And if you’re deciding which DMR network to actually run on it, Brandmeister vs. TGIF covers how the two compare.
Hotspot acting flaky even after picking your software? Check Choosing a Power Supply for a DMR Hotspot, since a weak supply causes a lot of problems that look like software issues.