When it comes to hardware you will need to an interface to connect your Raspberry Pi to your radios. This can be accomplished by one of the following approaches: Purchase a ready made interface from one of our partners or build your own interface.

Pre-Designed Hardware & Partners

A ready-made interface or pre-designed kit is the way to go if you don’t want to mess with designing your own circuit. OpenRepeater has formed some relationships over the years with some hardware partners to make it easy to get your repeater on the air with a professionally designed circuit board for your professional repeater installation. If your serious about your repeater…this is your ticket.

ICS Controllers - PI-REPEATER (USA)

ICS Controllers family of PI-REPEATER controllers offers a ready-to-go, fully assembled interface board to go between your Raspberry Pi and your radios. These controllers feature onboard sound (no external USB sound cards) and are offered in a number of different port configurations from 1 to 6 ports.

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The SVXLink card is a pre-designed interface board offered as a kit by F5UII & F8ASB from France. It is a two port design and one of it’s unique features is it’s inclusion of 4 onboard relays. Sales of the kit are typically made available by group orders a few times a year. You will need visit their page to determine availability.

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BYOH (Build Your Own Hardware)

Perhaps you are on a shoe string budget, or you just like to tinker and want to try OpenRepeater out. Here you can find some guidelines to assembling your own rudimentary interface from scratch or using cheap interfaces to make the ORP magic happen. Great, start here and have fun, but proceed with caution…fried Pis don’t taste good.

Concepts to Building Your Own Interface
Below you will find links to a multipart series of short knowledge base articles that explain the general concepts of creating a DIY interface between your Raspberry Pi and your radios. Get your graph paper and soldering iron ready!
 

The Easy Digi is a great little interface made by KF5INZ intended for HF digital modes, but can be cobbled into a low budget interface for ORP. It will handle audio isolation for RX and TX channels as well as PTT. It is advised that you build a simple add on circuit to handle the COS/GPIO control.

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