[Aaron, N3MBH]

At 5v I would just recommend building a simple optocoupler circuit. If it is 5V when active, you build your circuit to light up the LED on the optocoupler with proper resistance in series for your needs. On the phototransistor side of the optocoupler you will just wire that up to pull the COS GPIO pin to ground (low) when the LED is lit. Be sure to add in a pull up resister to pull the COS GPIO pin up to 3.3 volts when the LED is off. This will prevent the COS input pin from floating and causing erratic behavior.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

Right now ORP is currently setup to run as a full duplex repeater controller. This means you need 2 radios. A simultaneous receiver and transmitter. In the future we might add the option to use it as a simplex node which would only require 1 transceiver. This site also doesn’t really get into all the ins and outs of running a repeater. 2 Baofengs are really a poor choice. You are going to deafen your receive radio with the transmitter. For same band repeater you are going to need some substantial filters/cavities to isolate your inputs and outputs. You might be able to rig up a single way cross band repeater with your receive and transmit on different bands. This will give you more separation. To learn more about how repeaters work repeater-builder.com is probably a good resource.

The USB sound card connects into the easydigi and the easydigi will wire up to the 2 radios.There is an illustration on the Hardware Getting Started page. You will also need to build COS circuit as well as VOX is strongly discouraged.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

For the mic input on your sound card that is your RX side. That would be mono So tip (signal) and sleeve (ground). You can probably wire the ring in the with sleeve (ground) effectively making it a mono connector.

For the output of the sound card, this is your TX side. That is usually stereo on the card. You can use the tip and sleeve (left channel) or ring and sleeve (right channel).

As long as you got the EasyDigi with the optocoupler, you should be able to wire that up to operate the PTT like on your TX radio. As for the RX radio, you would have to rig up your own control circuit to operate the COS line. I discourage the use of vox for detecting squelch on the RX radio.

Hope that helps.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

Hello Dana,
Thanks for the interest in the project and I hope you have fun with it. Yes, the SDR receiver thing has been brought up before. Unfortunately at this time it is not on the immediate road map. Reason being because many of those SDR receivers are pretty low end. They also have a wide receive range which makes them highly susceptible to noise and desensitization. This makes them a poor candidate for a repeater site or in high RF environments. We would also have to solve the COS issue for switching as VOX squelch is a poor solution for a repeater. At this point and time, I would say you’d be better off which a cheap radio. to server those purposes.

I certainly understand the appeal, but until someone wants to invest the time to fully develop, test, and document the inclusion of SDR dongles the prospect looks bleak. ORP is open source, and so is the SVXLink core, so anyone can tackle this if they have the time.

For the time being, I have a list of other improvements to work on to make it more functional as a standard repeater controller. Thanks for the input and good luck with your deployment.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

Thanks for the update. I believe Richard is changing some things for the next release.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

No I have not messed with the Wifi, as I use the Ethernet plus it is more stable in an RF environment. The instructions I previously posted should point you in the right direction.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

Mauro,
Thanks for your patience. I’ve been looking into this while I’ve been working on some other updates. There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with the web interface and php scripting. In fact, the same code works fine on my development board (Beaglebone Black) and I can upload, convert, and playback the WAV and MP3 files that you sent to me without issues.

When I tried to do the same on my RPI3 that I am using for testing it didn’t work…It said it was successful, but it wasn’t. The RPI3 has some newer UI code on it, pulled from the development branch but the system is based on the 1.1.0 IMG files. The issue seems like it might be two fold.

The first appears that the sox audio utility that the PHP script relies on is not installed. You can verify this by typing:

which sox

If it’s installed you will get a path back. From your post above you said that you converted your files with sox. I am not sure if you did this on your board if you did it on another machine.

For those that need to install sox on the 1.1.0 image, SSH into the board as root (directions) and run the following command at the prompt:

apt-get install sox

You may need to reboot afterwards.

The other item that might be an issues is permission on the web interface folder. There is a symlink in there that points to where the sound are actually located. On my board, this was set incorrectly, but that could be do to me using git to pull down development files and recreating symlinks. All the other folders outside of the web root seem to be set find. If you need to change the permissions, the easiest thing is probably just to reset the entire web folder with this command:

chown www-data:www-data /var/www/openrepeater -R

Hope that helps!

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

OpenRepeater is offered free of charge. Find out how you can support us.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Aaron, N3MBH.

[Aaron, N3MBH]

Jerry,
Thanks for your previous comment. I have just gotten around to testing the ONLINE_CMD config option in svxlink. Works like a charm. I have built out a UI for it in ORP and it will be included in the next release.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

OpenRepeater is offered free of charge. Find out how you can support us.

[Aaron, N3MBH]

Greetings and thanks for you input. A very valid point and one that I hope to address in the near future. We are working on some updates to the code, one of the most important updates being easily accessible means to remotely shut down the repeater. Either by DTMF or via the web gui. Previously, that was only possible via the command line via a SSH connection.

I agree videos are very important and I hope to have some time to put a more comprehensive video together after the new release. That way I can feature some of the newer additions as well as a fully functioning interface board. I also want to eventually create a user gallery area where we can share other peoples installations. I think this will be both encouragement and inspiration to others.

I know people are implementing this, I just having seen a lot of pics yet.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

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[Aaron, N3MBH]

We are working adding that ability in the next release. Otherwise, it would require some hacking in the 1.1.0 or earlier builds.

73,
Aaron – N3MBH / WRFV871

OpenRepeater is offered free of charge. Find out how you can support us.

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