I have heard of something called RoIP, or radio over IP. I know there are a coupple of free programs out there in the ham world but I need to create one for the business world. I have not found much information on this. I am planning to use Perl to control like a software phone on each computer hooked to a radio. This software will key the radio, route the audio from the mic input of the computer over the internet, and also put the information out of the speaker output to be picked up by a radio. Has anyone heard of this and if so, where I could find information on this so I don’t reinvent the wheel?
its called IRLP and it is a card that interfaces with a linux box. But its mostly for ham. Now, there is a rx/tx card that plugs into the pci slot and works with
commercial radio if thats what you are looking for. look in voip-info.org for more information on it.
There are ham applications that will use the audio from your sound card (mic / speaker) and a rs-232 connection to the radio for the PTT.
For example, you can use your sound card with some windows software that will allow you to do packet without a TNC. All that is needed is to buy (or build the simple circuit) that will interface the rs-232 (or it could be the parallel port, can’t remember) to the PTT on your radio. I haven’t done this, but I have it on my list of things to do with my older Thinkpad.
It shouldn’t be too hard to use the same concept for voice comms. Do a google of “sound card TNC” to get started.
As for ham vs. commercial, a radio is a radio, so as long as you can get audio to / from the radio, and control the PTT, it should work either way.
You could probably use the console of asterisk with an AGI script to control the PTT of the radio and use the sound card mic / speaker. The only obstical would be how you handle the full-duplex audio on asterisk to the half duplex audio of a radio.
Justin
I’ve used something similiar to what you want in a commercial product. It comes in hardware/software configs and works pretty well.
http://www.vega-signaling.com/RadioDispatch/products.nsf/pages/IP-223_Dual_IP_Remote_Adapter_Panel
(no relation)
I have heard of IRLP and researched it. I heard it uses Speak Freely and just has a few programs that controll Speak Freely. That’s what I was thinking about doing but decided against that. I actually use Echolink now and have a radio hooked up to it for Ham use at the moment with an interface that I built. I just need to do this for the business sector and cannot use the ham programs for buisiness purposes. That’s when I turned to asterisk. I just need to learn how I can control the stuff and control asterisk on the computers.
My interface just has an input in to the mic input of the computer that comes from the speaker output, attenuated of course, an output from the speaker out, again, antenuated, and the control line comming from the COM port for PTT. All of this is isolated with relays and transformers. I will change the relay to an optocouppler in the future to lower the key response time.
Sorry, got off the subject but just wanted to explain my situation a little clearer. Thanks for the input, I am going to check that link right now.