We’ve been using Poor Man’s voting with a PL tone that hasn’t been very effective. So we’re going to use Allstar and its voting capabilities. I know fully well that Allstar can be used to create a very capable controller but we’re going to connect it to our RC210’s. We’re going to do this at three sites. We will be using a pi3 to handle the voting and from there I have an RTCM that I assume I will simply interface to the controller. I would need two more. As I understand it Micro-Node is no longer accepting new orders. Many thanks to him for his years of service to the ham community.
At any rate, is this the preferred method of connection? I know that I can take a FOB and modify it but I’m kind of a perfectionist. What is the best way to interface the pi3 to the controller?
The only thing I’m going to do it each side is set them up so that they provide weather and the FIPS code activation at that repeater location in a manner that does not send it across the entire network. But we’re going to keep it simple other than that. Of course I know that I’m going to need GPS to lock the transmitters and fortunately our provider has 5.8 GHz connectivity between sites. That’ll give us low latency. Any recommendation on an inexpensive GPS module?
What are some other considerations I should have? This will be our first real deployment of AllStar. We want Allstar/IRLP/EchoLink running across the network. I’m assuming that we can do this with one Pi3? I’m also assuming that a daemon runs separately for each service? We will be connected to a IRLP conference channel full time that only an admin can change.
The only thing other than voting that we’re going to do is set up weather and FIPS code activation pertinent to the site so that it doesn’t go across the entire network. We will do a phone patch using Vonage and the built-in phone patch on the RC210. They all have RTC’s and audio delays.