[arm-allstar] URI connection to Bridgecom repeater

[John Wagner]

Mike - Here’s a link to a diagram I put together showing how I connected the URIx to the W3KKC board, which all interfaces to the Bridgecom repeater. http://n8cd.com/NewController.pdf <http://n8cd.com/NewController.pdf>  I put it all in a 1RU rack box with some other components for telemetry and so on, so there’s probably more there than you need. But if you look at the NewController.pdf and the repeater_wiring-installed.pdf I sent earlier, I think that should be enough to get you going.
 - John, N8CD

> On Aug 29, 2016, at 2:43 PM, John Wagner <john at n8cd.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <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:
> 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.
> 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.
> 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 <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 <mailto: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 <mailto:mike.lussier at gmail.com>>
> To: arm-allstar at hamvoip.org <mailto:arm-allstar at hamvoip.org>
> Subject: [arm-allstar] URI connection to Bridgecom repeater
> Message-ID:
>         <CAJ_8STn82KGSZPbSuGxzBpKgy8cstoMK4ti4hmAtVcbgZfwiqQ at mail.gmail.com <mailto: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
> 
> 
> 

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