DSDPlus Fastlane multiple vc dongles.

[kennethcusmano]

(posted this earlier in wrong place i think.) ok so i went over and over the files to try to find my answer first also tried some tinkering with a copy of fastlane to try to use more than a cc dongle and a vc dongle. i have 4 dongles and want to use 3 as vc and 1 as cc. i tried changing port numbers by 10 as i have seen in other posts. i have made a little progress i think but non that work effectivly. how can i use more than 2 dongles 1 cc 3 vc. sorry if this is already listed, please point me in the right direction. i used to vb cable to pipe phase1 audio from unitrunker using command line, but now that i have fastlane i would love to just use fastlane as standalone. sorry so winded thanks. the system changed to phase 2

 

[kennethcusmano]

I wrote an email to dsd+ fl they responded "
Hello, DSD+ does not support one CC dongle feeding multiple VC dongles.

We would suggest using each dongle in a combined CC/VC monitoring role,
with each dongle handling a different set of talkgroups. "

can someone point me in the right direction on how to do this? i'm super new with dsd my only experience for the last couple years was just piping audio through vb cables. unitrunker handled the rest.

 

[rlmurray56]

I'm not real clear on what you are trying to accomplish, sounds like maybe you want to tune one control channel and listen to three separate talk groups ?.....but you might have better success with SDRTrunk. It's easier to setup multiple dongles (my opinion)

 

[kennethcusmano]

well i used unitrunker for a long time and i had the ability to use 1 control channel dongle to feed 3 voice dongles and pipe the audio through multiple instances of dsd free version with a couple virtual cables. that way i could send the audio from the different dsd's to seperate speaker outputs. in effect i could listen to multiple conversations from different speakers at the same time. i found that with just 1 voice dongle i could only hear one person talk at a time. but with the setup i used it wasn't uncommon to have 3 different conversations on the same system at the same time, in effect i didn't miss anything. but the system switched to phase 2. my free dsd couldn't decode phase 2. i tried op25 on a virtual machine, i found it a very difficult program to use. i emailed the fastlane people and was told that the functionality of running multiple voice dongles from 1 control channel wasn't possible yet. wich in a little way nullifies / answers the question i stated above. However if i am able to reincorporate unitrunker and fastlane together like i did with the old dsd but allow it to decode phase 2 i would love to do that. i tried doing just that, sending audio to fastlane through vb cables like i used to but was unable to get fastlane setup properly to do it. i tried doing it like i used to by opening dsd command line and setting input and outputs. but fastlane gave me an issue because it wouldn't allow me to set the audio input -i1 -o5 (just an example) because it uses a port for an audi server like " -i20002 (example i don't have the program open at the moment) but i will say this DSDPlus fastlane works amazing well and i am trying to get used to it. out of all the programs i have tried it truly did the best phase 2 decoding. i guess if possible i would like help figuring out how to pipe unitrunker to dsd+fl like i did with dsd+ free. i haven't been able to figure it out. sorry so winded and thank you for responding.

 

[slicerwizard]

I would get my Fast Lane folder set up and working (sounds like you have that done), then make copies of it to other folders.

In each copied folder, edit the FMP24-CC.bat file to either reference a specific dongle (-i<num> or -i"serialString") or any available dongle (-i0). Also edit the link ID so each folder is using a unique one (20001, 20002, 20003, 20004).

Then run the FMP24-CC.bat and 1R.bat files to get a dongle and a copy of DSD+ running. In the DSD+ Input menus, set the link ID to match the link ID you set for FMP24 in that folder.

Then use group priorities and monitoring threshold to have each copy monitor specific groups. If I were doing that, I might use the separate instances for police / fire / ambulance / everything else.

 

[kennethcusmano]

Am currently away from the sdr machine, but glad to know i was on the right track! I actually did something very similar, i copied the dsd folder and then i set which dongle i wanted 2 or 3 because 0 and 1 were already running on dsd+fl from the other folder, one set as cc and one as vc, however that was as far as i had gotten, oh i forgot to mention the other 2 dongles that i tried as vc's from the copy folder i seperated the ports number by 10 as apposed to one because i may not know enough yet to do what i'm hoping to accomplish, it isn't from a lack of trying. I read a post somewhere and the person said it was better to seperate by 10's because something about being within like closer than 2 ports could cause issues. so far i have never ran the 1r.bat file though, i used the quick setup from the youtube video and have only run mine (and works best for me in this order) cc.bat - vc.bat - fmp24-cc.bat - fmp24-vc.bat so yeah i'm super noob and will definitely read those instructions you gave just gave me 100 times till i get it right. thank you i will let you know how it goes.

 

[kennethcusmano]

so yeah i haven't been very successful yet in using 4 dongles yet, 1 for cc and 3 for vco. i've been messing with it and trying like crazy to no avail. . sad to say it but i am getting a little frustrated. but i'm gonna keep trying.