In TETRA(TErrestrial Trunked RAdio) standard, TMO(Trunked Mode Operation) communicates with the UE through the base station and it has a higher priority than DMO(Direct Mode Operation) which communicates with UE directly for channel allocation. As a result, the UE needs an algorithm which restricts the frequency allocation by TMO so that DMO can have a successful communication within the network. However, the TETRA DMO standard does not consider this issue. In this paper, we propose an active DMO channel selection algorithm which allocates a channel based on some additional information such as channel usage state of TMO and channel utilization of DMO. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing DMO channel allocation scheme in terms of the transmission efficiency.