[App_rpt-users] USB audio and telemetry timers

[David McGough]

Hi everyone,

I've been using app_rpt for well over a year now on a home UHF repeater
that includes 2 remote bases (HF & VHF). For the hardware interface, I'm
using DMK Engineering URI adapters. This config has worked fairly well,
overall.  But, so far I've used this system casually.

Over the last few weeks, I've finally gotten "serious" about implementing
some new repeaters, etc., for local ham community. So, I'm now trying to
iron-out the remaining issues and, wondered if anyone else has already got
solutions.

To start with, I "upgraded" to the latest and greatest by installing the
most recent ACID release on a new AMD X2 Athlon 64 6000+ box (MSI
K9N6PGM2-V motherboard, 4GB RAM). I was, at this point, running the latest
CentOS 5.3 and app_rpt version 0.174.  I immediately hit problems. The
telemetry timers were getting "stuck" (e.g. the idrecording would stop and
the transmitter would hang keyed until timeout) and audio was sporadically
moderately garbled....

So, I download the latest SVN version (v362).  This helped, but, problems
persisted....So, I download the most recent kernel (2.6.30.5) and
compiled. I wanted to use the high-res kernel timer, and had to patch
ztdummy.c to support the most recent (as of 2.6.28?) kernel interface API.  
This GREATLY improved everything! No more timer issues, etc., so far!
...zttest now reports timer consistancy of 99.997%!


But, I still have 2 longstanding issues that I'd love to find resolution
for. First, I'm still getting a fairly frequent stream of warning messages
like:

	WARNING[xxx]: chan_usbradio.c:1640 soundcard_writeframe: write: used 3 blocks (1)

And, these messages accompany somewhat choppy (or raspy)  audio when they
occur. I've seen these messages on several different boxes. So, it doesn't
seem to be specifically hardware or kernel related.

Second, I'm still seeing fairly frequent false DTMF decoding. This, too,
causing a momentary choppiness (muting) in the audio. On some peoples
voices, this false decoding (and chop) is severe. Last year I added some 
explicit code to chan_usbradio.c to disable DTMF decode, and, this problem 
was temporarily hidden. But, now I need DTMF decode--so, disabling isn't 
an option.

Thanks in advance for any help!

73, David kb4fxc