[App_rpt-users] Mountaintop Beagleboard/app_rpt application, your thoughts appreciated

[Phil N6TCT]

Would love the lists'' thoughts on the following.

I'm with the Black Rock Amateur Radio Association.  We currently have
a solar/battery-powered UHF repeater with phone patch up on a
mountaintop overlooking the Black Rock desert in Nevada.  The system
has a 5 GHz digit 802.11 link via a Ubiquiti NS-5 wifi radio to the
town of Gerlach, about 14 miles south.  The existing repeater
controller is a Zetron Model 30 with phone patch.  The phone patch
connects to a VOIP analog telephony adapter, which sends SIP over the
5 GHz digital link down to an asterisk machine in Gerlach and thence
to the rest of the world.  An IRLP node radio in Gerlach connects to
the UHF repeater via UHF just like any repeater user would.

My thought for upgrading the system this spring is to replace the
Zetron and VOIP box on the mountaintop with a dual-port repeater
controller and a Beagleboard running asterisk.  One port on the
repeater controller would go the UHF radios, per usual, the other port
goes to the Beagleboard (via either a USB URI or Lox board).  Asterisk
on the Beagleboard would talk IAX over the digital link to the
Asterisk system in Gerlach.  The IRLP node in Gerlach would also be
connected directly to the Asterisk system for improved audio.  And of
course, the proposed system could also get us onto Echolink and
Allstar.

I realize that I could probably eliminate the dual-port repeater
controller and just use app_rpt directly, but that removes some
redundancy from the system: with both the dual-port controller and the
beagleboard, if the beagleboard fails for some reason we still have a
working repeater... and I've done enough 8-hour truck rolls from the
bay area out to the Black Rock that I've come to appreciate having
some amount of fault tolerance.  :-)

Very interested in any thoughts folks have around this.  Thanks!

Phil, N6TCT
President, Black Rock Amateur Radio Association -- http://cq-blackrock.org