So, I'm hoping to get some opinion on this. I've been having a discussion with our RF guys on replacing our existing 3 port RLC repeater controller with an app_rpt setup, since we have more than 3 things to connect. There's some apprehension from non PC guys (and even myself, as a PC guy) about the reliability of a PC based system. We're not using our repeater for emergency or disaster response, and it's not operating at the top of a mountain, but, nobody wants something that they have to horse around with to keep it running. My thought would be not to stack a machine with USB dongles, but rather to connect each standalone repeater system to a RTCM. The RTCM would then connect to a hub PC (or multiple if it supports fall through to a second host). That way, if the hub computer failed, the standalone repeaters would revert to simple CW ID repeaters.
However, I realize that everything's computers nowadays. I don't know if the RTCM is actually running a small embedded Linux, or if it's arbitrary code of some other nature. I can't tell. I'm trying to get a feel for their reliability thus far. I know that Asterisk and linux will pretty much just sit there, unless I trigger some sort of bug, for a long time. I actually had a HDD failure that took my Allstar node to read-only FS and it continued to run pretty much just fine until I got a drive out there to repair it, so I'm confident that we won't have issues. But, I gather that chan_voter is still a work in progress, I'm not sure if it's advisable to pursue this at this time, or wait until things are further along.
I also ran into some comment about duplex being a problem for linked users - there was not any timer available to allow, on a full duplex system or link, non full duplex users to connect to the system and be able to transmit and talk, as their system would be in use until everyone else cleared out, a difficult scenario. Can't say for sure since we haven't gotten there yet but I could see it.
