There are a few ways to do what you want — that is permanently tie multiple repeaters together — if I understand your question.

First, permanent connections are not as permanent as you might expect. If the computer that initiated the permanent connections goes down the connection will not reestablish. However you can have a startup macro make the connection as Asterisk starts. Also, there seems to be some intermittent bug, which I’ve never pinned down, where permanent connections won’t reestablish with out forcing a disconnect first. 

Second way is with RTCMs. They are a whole lot easier to deploy and way more reliable than a bunch of USB type nodes, with the trade off in expense. Although by the time you buy a BBB and a URI you’re getting close to the expense of an RTCM. Of course you can go with a cheep sound dongle and an eBay used thin client PC. It’s the ‘ol time/money/reliability trade off. I strongly recommend the RTCM approach. 

And a third option is called app_radbridge. If you don’t want to buy RTCMs this is probably the way to go. I’ve never tried to use it. The only documentation I am aware of is in the source which is reproduced here. 

/* This application is intended to provide a generic "bridging"
   functionality for radio-oriented Asterisk channels.

   The idea here is that certain radio applications lend themselves
   to needing a "generic" (passes audio and tx/rx keying completely
   transparently) to and from two or more endpoints.

   An example of such an appication might be replacing (or providing
   equivlent new functionaliy of) one or more full-duplex UHF control
   links with an IP-based one(s).

   app_radbridge allows multiple instances of radio-oriented channels
   transparently "bridged" together.

   The config file (radbridge.conf) allows specification of each
   "bridging" instance and what radio-oriented Asterisk channels
   are to be associated with it. There is no need for any other
   specificaiton of configuration.

   The file format for radbridge.conf departs somewhat from the standard
   usage (at least for radio stuff) of the Asterisk config file architecture.

   In most other radio-oriented cases, an instance of whatever it is
   gets defined as a "Stanza" in the config file. In this case, because
   of limitations in the way that Asterisk parses config files, that 
   was not possible. Instead, all config information goes into the
   [general] stanza, and each line of config info defines a different
   instance of radio bridging.  For example:

[general]

instance1 = Voter/1234,Radio/5678
instance2 = Voter/1235,Radio/5679

    This example would define two radio bridging instances "instance1"
    and "instance2", each with 2 channels associated with them.

    The supported channel types are "Voter" (chan_voter), "Radio"
    (chan_usbradio), "SimpleUsb" (chan_simpleusb), and "Zap" ("Dahdi")
    (chan_dahdi, for the couple of devices that use this channel
    driver, such as the PCIRadio card, and separate analog channels
    using an ARIB board or such).

    Rather then "adding" (which would actually be a lot of *removing*
    optionally) this functionality in app_rpt, it made more sense to
    create a separate application specifically for this purpose. In
    addition, this allows for a system that is merely provided for
    doing this bridging application and nothing else radio-oriented,
    to not have to run app_rpt at all.    
*/

--
Tim
:wq

On Sep 28, 2014, at 12:28 PM, Robert Newberry <N1XBM@amsat.org> wrote:

So as it stands I have a one node system. I have another URI on the way and will have  BBB soon. The eventual plan is to have a few repeaters and some simplex nodes at people's houses for RF hot spot access.

What is the best way to tie these together? I understand you can set permanent links that will reestablish connection if lost.

Is there other ways of accomplishing this? I only ask because I have my one node setup with email, autopatch and all other kinds of bells and whistles. I'd like to be able to do all of this from other RF locations and I wonder if I need to just set each node up accordingly or can one node be the workhorse and the other nodes just be dumb connections.

Did I make any sense with that question?

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