I am working on adding AllStar capability to one of my club’s repeaters using a remote base RF link to the repeater. This is my first time setting up an AllStar node, and with lots of help from the awesome Wiki, I have been able to work out nearly all other issues I had but this particular one has me stumped.
I am running the HamVoIp image on an RPi 3B connected to a knockoff SHARI hotspot
The issue I’m running into is when the node unkeys the repeater’s short 1sec hangtime causes the node to trip. I am running the node with no telemetry or hangtime so thankfully it did not cause an infinite ping-pong between the repeater and the node. But it still causes the repeater’s hangtime to be sent out to any other nodes I am connected to.
Turning up rxondelay to around 1sec in the simple USB tune menu solves the hangtime but introduces the unfortunate side effect of cutting off the first second of audio of every local repeater transmission.
In HamVoIP, using a negative value in rxondelay will only apply that delay after someone keys toward your node.
In other words, no cut-off will happen if anyone just keys your repeater normally, but if someone keys toward your node on the network, then unkeys, when the transmission drops, the first X milliseconds will be ignored.
If you must use an RF link to a repeater, it would be best to have a dedicated linking frequency with no telemetry, or have the node on-site, either plugged into a repeater controller’s link port, or set up as the repeater controller itself, if you can manage that.
It’s the same with HamVoIP re frames. However, a positive value always delays, but a negative value only delays after the end of a transmission toward the node to avoid pingpongs and such.
This RF link is temporary while we are working to get networking to the repeater site so we can have a full duplex audio connection directly to the repeater.
