[App_rpt] Voters

[Charles Suprin]

Steve,

I beg to differ with your waste comment. However my knowledge lives more on 
the radio side than the asterisk side. The following ideas show the 
flexibility and perhaps even a cost savings that a Asterisk Voter offers. 
Please share any thoughts on the matter.

As asterisk can interface with telephone lines and radios, from a connection 
aspect, it can drop in to the slot currently held by a voter.  This would 
only require a single asterisk box. All the signals are available to that 
one box and it creates the receive audio internally. This configuration does 
not require multiple Asterisk boxes.

If an internet connection is available at the repeater site, a single 
broadband connection can handle many more IAX2 feeds than the similar price 
in POTS lines.  This reduces monthly operating costs for people using leased 
lines.

Additionally, if only phone lines are available to the site, an asterisk box 
at the site and one at another location, perhaps someone's home, can receive 
audio over the phone line, and send a voted audio stream back over the full 
duplex link.  Once back at the site, the audio can be dumped over the radio. 
This architecture allows more receivers than before and correspondingly 
better coverage.

Hams generally being high tech people, several I know have towers and 
already use Asterisk for telephone.  These folks are now much cheaper to 
turn into receiver sites using asterisk than with either a leased line 
configuration (Recurring cost) or radio link. ( save on the transmitter and 
directional antenna.  Also eliminates the line of sight requirements back to 
the main repeater.)

Furthermore if a receiver site fails and physical access is difficult, for 
weather or any other reason, Asterisk scales more gracefully to handle more 
connections to accept more receivers from less advantageous locations. 
Again, I am assuming that club members or others can host the receiver 
locations.

There do remain issues with these architecures. How well do dynamic IP 
address fit into the architecture? What about firewall configurations? What 
about unreliable links? These are all open questions to me. As I said, I am 
coming at this from the radio side.

I believe the finances really shift depending on whether one is looking at a 
commecial installation, where several of the costs born by club members away 
are real.

Charles
AA1VS


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Rodgers" <hwstar at rodgers.sdcoxmail.com>
To: "Asterisk Repeater Controler" <app_rpt at lists.illiana.net>
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:28 PM
Subject: Re: [App_rpt] Voters


> If you turned off the ID and courtesy tones in rpt.conf it should work. It 
> is
> somewhat of a waste to do this though as 2 or more asterisk systems are
> required. Also you will have to initiate the connection some way from each
> voting receiver on power up.
>
> Steve, WA6ZFT
>
>
>
> On Thursday 19 January 2006 18:00, Charles Suprin wrote:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> Has anyone tried to use asterisk as a voting receiver?  It seems that if
>> all the receivers are in the same conference bridge then it should work 
>> ok.
>> Atleast at first.
>>
>> There may be some enhancements to be made in terms of passing SNR 
>> measures
>> either as part of the vocoder stream or as part of the IAX2 metadata to
>> make it a true voter.
>>
>> Charles
>>
>>
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