Hello all!! How many of you are familiar with the M Centracom Gold Elite dispatch console? or the MCC-7500 Series Digital Console ? Basically the "Gold Elite" system is a big switch with some rather unique features when employed in a Trunking System... However Ham Radio is obviously conventional radio and I believe that the stuff we are playing with can be adapted to serve as a Dispatch Console talking to, cross patching with many or few Nodes (Conventional Resources). I am looking at creating a GUI that is operationally setup with config files similar to a DialPlan script. The new thin client looks very promising for this! Plus they are cheap! I talked with Micro Node today and got good vibes from Mark. At any rate, a thin client card can be tied to a mic, speaker and a footswitch. My concept calls for clicking an ICON on a screen, this action will automatically connect to the Node represented by by that ICON, when the footswitch is pressed, it initiates a transmission to that Node. This is all rudimentry thinking at this point.... but the flexiblitly of Asterisk and Allstar Link could make this a very doable thing! I have been playing with this for only a few days, and I am impressed, pumped up and cant believe how this is such a powerfull system! If anyone has thoughts, ideas or has already done it, feel free to give me a jingle! I deal alot with 911 Dispatch Centers on a daily basis.... Those systems are very expensive when purchased new, overly expensive used and complicated, very hardware intensive and run on MS Operating Systems.... total turn off!! This is a home grown solution that will cost a fraction at the most of a full commerical system from the M company. Anyone interested? Ron Simpson, 209 642-6559 N6GKJ Amateur Radio ................... Have you ever noticed that when you are looking for something, it is always found in the last place you look?