Repeater controller options/opinions

[kayn1n32008]

I'm not sure if this is the best place for this. Bear with me.

The club I'm involved with is looking to replace their repeater controllers. The core site currently has 2x DPS404's tied together via TCP/IP and 6x SCom 7330 at our remote sites.

These controllers are NLA and there is concern about failure going forward. Having said that, they have been rock solid woth no failures over close to a decade of service.

There is also concern that the knowledge base to maintain them is being lost, the members that decided to go this route have moved on to other places.

We are looking to completely refresh out network hardware wise, and have decided to replace all our VHF and UHF. This is fully replacing 7 repeaters and associated links at 5 remote sites. Doing so is going to update a variety of manufacturers of varying vintage(from MSR2000's to semi-recent Kenwoods) and standardize on a single manufacturer. This is also going to allow us to clean up the audio chain through out the system.

The issue I'm finding, in looking at repeater controllers that are currently manufactured, is we need 5x full duplex ports and 1x half duplex port at our core site. Our linked sites need 1x full duplex and 1x half duplex. Some of our sites may need an additional half or full duplex port in the future.

In some light google searching today, the only controller that can support our core site appears to be made by ICS, a developmental 8 port controller. They also make a 4 port model that may suit our needs IF they can be linked, similarly to how the DSP404 can be linked.

The only problem I have is that these controllers are RPi based, and I have concerns about uptime reliability.

What's the communities opinion of the new breed of RPi based controllers? Positive and negative.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

I have two methods that I would approach it.

I ordered a Pi Controller 1x two days ago to give it a try. You can add remote resources to it (i.e. another receiver and transmitter pair via IP) so you could scale multiple co-located Pi Controllers fairly easily (the SVXLink documentation has some examples on this actually). I want to see how well that transports data between nodes (not relying on Echolink). Maybe see about trying app_rpt as well and see how it does. Benefit to using a Pi...if you have someone who can write the controller software you can roll a custom solution.

If money weren't an object I would probably go JPS NXU-2B and just multicast everything in the same VLAN at your master site. That also provides some advanced scalability as if you ever upgrade your links to Narrowband IP or change to a different IP solution (which would eliminate the analog duplex link) you just take that NXU-2B for that corresponding link and install it on the remote repeater (assuming you are experienced with an IGP and multicast routing solution) and you now have a multi-path capable self healing network that looks a lot like a EFJ Atlas conventional system. Scalable, upgradable and translates better to the next generation of IT guy (I mean radio tech).

I'm working on something similar actually. Full duplex analog linking with custom controllers. We've got the 70 cm pairs, several of the "club's" board members sit on the state coordination body board...all I need to do is update the full duplex analog links to full duplex NB-IP links (about $2400 per link), $50 Mikrotik's and then decide on a gateway solution to get the analog audio to and from IP. Love to go with JPS...but that would get a wee bit pricey for 70 something sites.

 

[kayn1n32008]

While there is some budget, there is definitely not $70k worth of budget for this project.

I think we are going to buy some of the ICS Controllers and see what we can do in a lab environment first. Thankfully we don't have an urgency to this project. The system is functional at the moment, but it was built somewhat hammy, pieced together.

 

[Project25_MASTR]

Reminds me of a system that that full duplex amateur system I mentioned was based off of. TKR-750's using full duplex TKR-850's to transport audio (Tone Detect was used in place of COR and instead of PTT we used Tone enable/disable). Worked great until we tried to upgrade the TKR-750's for Quantars using ARCOM RC210's to match the levels. The high impedance audio lines were a pain to match against the Quantar's balanced audio lines. I think we even ended up having to double the resistor sizes from what the manual stated to get the levels right but had a difficult time getting below 8% distortion. That project is currently migrating to Z-series from JPS.

 

[tweiss3]

Are your remote sites IP linked or RF linked.

If you need voting/simulcast this is an option for roll your own, only if you have IP links available: AllstarLink Amateur Radio Voting and Simulcast – Using the Voter Board and Radio Thin Client Module It's not inexpensive, but it is cheaper than a JPS, and you can run custom announcements. You only need 1 RPi (I would run 2, 1 can be a failsoft).

The JPS stuff would be nice though, I just know I won't ever have a budget to think about playing in that realm.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Are your remote sites IP linked or RF linked.

If you need voting/simulcast this is an option for roll your own, only if you have IP links available: AllstarLink Amateur Radio Voting and Simulcast – Using the Voter Board and Radio Thin Client Module It's not inexpensive, but it is cheaper than a JPS, and you can run custom announcements. You only need 1 RPi (I would run 2, 1 can be a failsoft).

The JPS stuff would be nice though, I just know I won't ever have a budget to think about playing in that realm.

All remote sites are currently linked via a single UHF repeater(hub and spoke). Nothing is voted nor simulcast. Currently we do not have IP at any remote sites, but are actively exploring options for microwave PTP high bandwidth IP.

For now, we will be sticking with UHF to link in remote sites, when we are able to bring IP to remote sites, linking via IP is a very likely option.