I am working on building a split site 10-meter repeater with a microwave backhaul. The plan is to have one site monitor only and whatever audio it receives (with the correct PL tone) will then be pushed to the TX side via the microwave backhaul. On the TX side it will key the radio and push the audio from the RX side
Currently the setup includes:
1 x raspberry pi 5
1 x raspberry pi 3
2 x Master Communications RA-25
2 x Motorola Maxtrac Radios
I have configured the private nodes to be 1901 (TX) and 1902 (RX). I configured the nodes thru the ASL-Menu and set them to full duplex (Figured I could set one to monitor only via the iLink commands). But I am stuck and not sure where to go from here. Any help getting this set up is greatly appreciated!
I would highly suggest using chan_voter and a couple of VOTER/RTCM clients for this. The VOTER protocol was designed for these scenarios and is significantly more robust than trying to do it the "two nodes linked" method.
You could also use SimpleVoter and negate the need for VOTER/RTCM Clients and have just normal node hardware. If you have just the two sites I actually really recommend just a normal node and a UHF Link sites, but there is no reason you can’t use ASL +network as a back haul path.
This is a single receiver and single transmitter, so simple voter doesn't really apply here at all. Simple voter is just a crude implementation of RSSI based receiver voting, when you have a bunch of soundcards attached to the same host machine.
The VOTER protocol, while able to perform receive voting and named as though that is all it does, is just a radio-over-IP (RoIP) protocol. You can mix and match as little or as many receivers or transmitters as you like, all connecting back to a single ASL host machine, and presenting as a single cohesive repeater with a single node number.
Considering the system being built is a single transmitter and single receiver, split site with IP connectivity, VOTER RoIP is a no-brainer.
It's been a while since I've read the simple voter stuff. It looks like you can use it for split site and it would work, but I'm not sure why you would. An actual chan_voter setup seems like it would be much cleaner and more robust. No need to have multiple ASL hosts.
Simplicity and no expensive hardware mostly. One could argue that having one host is better than two, but you already have one anyway and take the “liability” of how ever fragile that install would be. Two would not be anymore effort.
But if the OP wants to just spend money on what could be done for less, that's his prerogative. YMMV. I used simple voter my split site 6M machine.