Hi All,
I had an old Windows 10 PC that I have repurposed as AllStarLink Node. I have installed Debian 13 on the laptop and successfully configured my node. I am able to connect to any node on the system.
My issue is with the sound interface. I have a Baofeng radio and I want connect this to the laptop.
Can you help me with hardware that I need to have, so that radio can interface with the allstarlink node?
Thanks.
A Baofeng is a pretty bad radio to try to connect to AllStarLink because it lacks the signals you need. You would need to buy an interface either from AllScan or NA6D AIOC that creates the semantics you need. Look for "K1 Jack" compatible.
So which phone do you recommend that is reasonably priced?
On 2026-08-13 13:33, N8EI wrote:
Someone replied to your post.
| N8EI ASL Community Admin
August 13 |
- | - |
A Baofeng is a pretty bad radio to try to connect to AllStarLink because it lacks the signals you need. You would need to buy an interface either from AllScan or NA6D AIOC that creates the semantics you need. Look for "K1 Jack" compatible.
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What do your mean by a phone?
Extremely sorry for the late reply.
My bad when I said "phone" i meant radio. So which radio do u recommend?
Also when u say semantics of Baofeng are bad, what does that mean? Can you please clarify?
Baofeng and many similar brands actually work very well for AllStar. Historically they were not considered the best option due to their not providing a COS line and due to many such HTs in the beginning of the cheap-Chinese-radio era ~15 years ago not being FCC certified or having good RF and audio specs. But that has all changed, and most of these HTs do in fact present a true hardware COS+CTCSS signal – in the form of a DC bias voltage that is present on the speaker audio line when the radio receives a valid signal and turns on its audio amp. URIs such as the AllScan URI50 or URI125 then detect this voltage and the result is a 100% accurate real-time COS line to ASL (this adds no delay, and is not a "VOX" type of mechanism). The RF SoC's that modern Chinese HTs are using have excellent audio quality, no different from even a ham mobile that is 10x the price. The audio is very clear, no noise, ~60dB SNR, and these have been used in 1,000's of nodes. See https://AllScan.info for details on my products as well as How-To guides on building nodes with HTs, mobile radios, or radio-less interfaces.
Incidentally I do not consider these HTs to be good for use an actual Handheld Transceiver. The internal mic and speaker are typically pretty bad, and the whole reason the bias voltage COS+CTCSS detection works is because they were too cheap to put in an AC coupling cap on the speaker audio line. A somewhat large cap is needed to AC couple an 8Ω load. So whenever these HTs are receiving they are putting ~1VDC into ~8Ω which is ~125mW of wasted power and battery drain. Personally I use a Motorola XTS2500 for talking into my radio nodes as the audio quality is amazingly good. But when used as node radio modules, Chinese HTs work great, and the above issues disappear because the internal mic and speaker are not used and you're going direct to the RF SoC through the K1 jacks.
Yep. I use an ANF-101 with two RT85's as one of my nodes. The audio isn't as good as a baseband radio, especially from the speaker out of the HT into the sound fob, but it's good enough for most people, especially after adding a delay line to get rid of squelch crashing. The RT85's and almost every other Chinese radio sends and receives STE, but HT's from the big three, Motorola, etc. do not, and I'm very picky about my node audio, and don't ever want anyone to hear a squelch burst from my nodes, so I use usbradio with all the filters open, with a rxsquelchdelay set to 200.
If you only use radios that send STE to talk to your node, using a radio that receives STE, you won't have that problem, but as David said, a lot of those radios aren't particularly great sounding for their intended application.
There are some exceptions, but for the most part, this is true.
The RT85's speaker output has that typical 300 Hz resonant band pass sound on it, which is made worse by talking to it with a Chinese radio that also has that same kind of band pass filter on it's microphone to radio pipeline.
I'd absolutely love to be able to directly modulate the RT85 and get a discriminator tap for improved frequency response, such as I can get with some other radios I have. Combined with my TYT MD-UV380, I have a sound that most people think is a radioless node. I can't get that with the RT85's, although they are nice radios from the RF perspective.
The only HT I know of which is capable of passing baseband without modification is the Kenwood TH-F6A in high speed data mode. I've tried using one as a simplex node with software CTCSS encoding and decoding, and it works and sounds great, but given the prices these old radios command, it's not economically viable.