At 04:56 AM 12/9/2009, hwstar@rodgers.sdcoxmail.com wrote:

Although sound cards and IRLP interfaces are what folks have, and these folks don't want to invest in a whole new radio interface due to the added costs, the developers feel that this is too much of a burden on them and therefore have no inclination to open up support for every sound card out there.

As there is already software which supports sound cards and IRLP boards (and a bunch of Echolink interfaces), such as thelinkbox, perhaps improving the integration batween Asterisk and this sort of software would be worth doing. I'd certainly like to be able to integrate Asterisk smoothly with my linkbox based systems. The chan_rtpdir driver went a long way to doing this, but it had a few limitations, like being stuck with the GSM codec. I'm sure if a better interface was developed, Skip would be happy to support it in thelinkbox and thebridge. I know chan_echolink or chan_irlp could be used to make an audio link, but on some configurations, that requires some careful scripting to treat the internal link to Asterisk separately from any conventional IRLP or Echolink connections. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com