[arm-allstar] Vote or not to vote

[Doug Crompton]

Darrell,

   The decision of how to do this is dependent on many things. One is
technical ability, another is budget, and another is flexibility. We have a
repeater we recently put on Allstar and at the same time took out an old
analog voter which had several site inputs via UHF. The equipment was old
and we were possibly going to lose all but one of the sites. It also never
worked great.

Like you, we found that some areas suffered because of mobile use and the
crazy idea that some have that they can use a handheld in their basements
to talk 10 miles.

There are basically two ways you can do this digitally as opposed to analog
with RF paths. The easy one is using different PL's on the same frequency.
This would require simplex RX only Allstar nodes at each remote site
connected back to the main site. You would only need receivers at these
sites and if you used a transceiver you would not connect the transmitter
PTT or audio. Since each site has a unique PL the users would select the PL
appropriate for their location. So this is a manual voting system.

The truly automatic Allstar voting system requires RTCM modules that use a
GPS input to synchronize the signals from multiple locations connected back
to the main site using Allstar. This is required because a true voting
system can switch between sites at a fast rate and the audios need to be in
sync. The signals sent back to the main site are then constantly analyzed
by the voting SW (part of the Hamvoip code) and the best S/N audio is
switched to the output of the repeater.   Unlike the analog RF method no
link transmitter/receiver is needed. This is all done over the Internet. As
you can imagine this is an expensive proposition probably as much as $500
per site or more.  You would need the RTCM, GPS module, Antenna and a
receiver and of course Internet availability at each site. There is also
the problem at the moment of obtaining an RTCM. While you might find them
used new ones are not currently being produced. This would also require
more technical expertise to setup and maintain.

This is why at least for now we have decided to go the manual PL driven
switching at one of our repeaters.


*73 Doug*

*WA3DSP*

*http://www.crompton.com/hamradio <http://www.crompton.com/hamradio>*


On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 9:12 PM "Darrell Black via ARM-allstar" <
arm-allstar at hamvoip.org> wrote:

> All, our repeater had to be moved a few years ago. Now we have a much
> larger TX footprint then RX footprint. Mostly due to changes in the
> terrain. We have spare receivers and was going to place them on the
> repeater input freq and have them link back to the repeater node. Do we
> need any special voter software or will allstar sort itself out if the
> signal is coming in from a satellite receiver and the main receiver also. I
> would think you want allstar to pick the strongest or most complete packet
> signal.
> --
>
> Darrell Black
>
> (517) 917-2226
> GigaHacker at gmail.com
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/darrellblack
>
>
> 73 de W8DSB
> "In God we trust, all others we monitor"
>
> GMRS WRDE739
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