[arm-allstar] URI connection to Bridgecom repeater (Mike Lussier)

[John Wagner]

Hi Mike, I recently did this for our local club to a new Bridgecom
BCR-50V.  We're using the RasPi as the repeater controller as well as the
Allstar interface. Overall, it works very well and we're very happy with
the results.

I have a more recent diagram of what we ended up with on another computer,
but here's the first stab of the connections I made that might save you
some work: http://n8cd.com/repeater_wiring-installed.pdf . I'll post an
updated one this evening to the list that uses W3KKC's SC-50 board (see #3
below)

Lessons learned:

   1. The receive sensitivity, receive audio quality, and the transmit
   audio quality with the combination of the URIx and the Bridgecom are
   excellent. You'd be hard pressed to tell incoming audio from repeated audio.
   2. We found the PL decoder on the Bridgecom repeater was a little slow
   to lock for our taste, as in about 750ms. It might be something we had
   configured incorrectly on the repeater, but we ended up fixing it with
   hardware by adding a Comspec board we had. You can see that in the diagram
   linked above.
   3. We found the squelch action on the Bridgecom to not be very good on
   weak signals. It's not horrible, but weaker mobile signals were getting
   chopped a lot sooner than we were used to, even with the Bridgecom squelch
   set to the minimum setting. After a couple months of experimenting, we did
   a phase 2 rebuild of our interface using W3KKC's excellent SC-50 board (
   http://www.masterscommunications.com/products/squelch/sc50.html ). That
   board has an old-school Motorola Micor squelch chip on it, and a PL
   decoder, so we replaced the Comspec board we added in #2 above with the
   SC-50 board. I'll dig up that interconnect diagram and send it to the list
   this evening.

 - John, N8CD


On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 1:00 PM, <arm-allstar-request at hamvoip.org> wrote:

>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 12:19:15 -0400
> From: Mike Lussier <mike.lussier at gmail.com>
> To: arm-allstar at hamvoip.org
> Subject: [arm-allstar] URI connection to Bridgecom repeater
> Message-ID:
>         <CAJ_8STn82KGSZPbSuGxzBpKgy8cstoMK4ti4hmAtVcbgZfwiqQ at mail.gmail.
> com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I'm interested in interfacing my Bridgecom repeater to the AllStar network.
> Has anyone already done this ? how well does it work ? I don't want to
> re-invent the wheel if it has already been done.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> 73
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.hamvoip.org/pipermail/arm-allstar/attachments/20160829/8d2c9a92/attachment.html>