I will see what I can answer at the time, but I have some questions for you about your use. If you want to extend your coverage from your property…being able to roam around with an HT and have your base retransmit at higher power, why not just use a base/mobile rig that has a cross-band repeat function in it? You won’t need all the bells and whistles if that’s your intent. Don’t get me wrong I am excited to have you interested in the project, but I am just wondering if it is too much for your needs.

If you do want to go this route I would recommend doing a one-way cross band repeater setup. In other words, you would receive on one band (i.e 70cm) and transmit on another (i.e. 2M). This would eliminate having to have duplexers/cans/filters to be able to achieve same band repeat. You’d just set your handheld up to transmit on 70cm to your one-way cross band repeater, then listen straight to the repeaters output that you are repeating to.

As far as the easy digi, you should need only one as it has two channels on it. Make sure that you don’t get the VOX model. You want one with the optocoupler on it to handle your PTT on the TX side. On the RX side you will probably need to mod that radio and add a COS output to it and do some simple interface circuitry to the COS gpio pin.

Don’t worry about the TTL adapter, you don’t really need that. It’s just another way to connect to the board..instead of network/ssh or a monitor/keyboard.

As for the RPI, you will probably be OK getting a RPI 3 if you want. The current build doesn’t support it just yet, but I just got my RPI 3 in and I am working on rebuilding the 1.1.0 release to work on both. The next release will be a little ways off. But if you are planning to use it around your property, one of the new features will be relay control, so that would be an advantage of going this route if you wanted to control things around your property with DTMF tones.

Hope this is of help.

I’m not sure that I completely follow. If your HT cannot receive the distant repeater and your base can, I am not certain how ORP will function in your setup. A standard Mobile/Base rig with cross band functionality would probably be your best bet. Those are bidirectional capable for that purpose where ORP is unidirectional. Hope that makes sense. You are certainly welcome to experiment as that is part of the fun of Ham Radio.

I would recommend the radio with the built in crossband repeater if I was trying to do what you were doing. You may be able to do something with a link radio (second port). But that’s not officially supported in ORP just yet, but SVXLink (the core code) supports it. You’d just have to do some customizations to the code.

Also I just wanted to let you know that the current build (1.1.0) has been updated to be compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3 as well as the RPI2. You can find this on our downloads page. Other than that nothing has change in the build…same version of ORP. Stay tune for a later announcement of our next release we are currently working on.

I was reading through this post because it interests me. I am interested in a full cross band repeat. The 2 bands I want to cross, I have not been able to locate a rig that offers the mode and the bands I want to use.

Would it even be possible to accomplish this task (full cross band) with this hardware and software?