Welcome to DVSwitch

I'm guessing one reason is if you open source it HamVoip can then compile it for arch

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 6:17 PM Steve N4IRS <szingman@...> wrote:

Because we do not feel it is in our or the communities best interest at this time.

On 11/26/20 7:58 PM, Skyler Fennell wrote:

Why is analog_bridge not open source? 

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 3:19 PM Tony Langdon <vk3jed@...> wrote:

On 26/11/20 3:54 am, Steve N4IRS wrote:
> DMR, after D-Star, is the most political of the digtial voice modes.
> Unlike the other modes, most DMR systems connect to a centralised
> server, known as a "master" and that is responsible for all of the
> talk group routine, personal calls, and position data interpretation
> and forwarding. There are three main centralised systems:
> BrandMeister, DMR+ (known as Phoenix in the UK), and TGIF.
>  
> What these systems have in common is that they are closed source. This
> is not good for the amateur community. There were mutterings about
> them having signed NDAs with Hytera and Motorola to get details of
> their internet connection protocols, which may or may not be true.
> Even if true, why not make the non-NDA parts of the source code open?
>  
> In the commercial world, digital voice repeaters, be they for DMR,
> P25, NXDN, or dPMR have limited abilities within themselves for call
> routing. They do include CPUs of course, but for anything other than
> simple point-to-point links, they are useless. This limitation is fine
> for what they were originally designed for, small centrally controlled
> networks, with or without a dispatching console function. The YCS
> system for System Fusion is looking to do the same for YSF and that is
> why I oppose it.
>  
> This model of a centralised control structure carried through to the
> amateur DMR networks. In its simplest form, a repeater would simply
> have a point-to-point network connection to the master and things
> would be fine. Even with a semi-distributed system, with one or more
> master per country, there is still some central control of the system
> with the power to overrule the decisions made at the local level. Such
> central control is also not conducive to supporting each countries
> requirements, and leads to much used functionality being arbitrarily
> removed. In the extereme case the countries master may also be
> removed. When such things happen you have to ask from where did they
> derive their authority? Who voted for them? Who made the decision and
> how do they know that it is correct?
I'm in agreement with the general idea.  I was involved in EchoIRLP,
which came about simply because people like me simply wanted to be able
to connect to whatever network we wanted.  EchoIRLP also incorporated
features to protect the networks from accidental cross linking, which
was one of the reasons it was readily accepted, once people got their
head around the concept.

While it's great to play with different modes, we do have a real "Tower
of Babel" when it comes to DV modes.  Projects like DV Switch do go a
long way towards mitigating the effect of having multiple incompatible
modes among a relatively small user base. 
>  
> In the amateur world we have gone beyond having dumb repeaters. Most
> MMDVM systems for example have a Raspberry Pi or similar running the
> system, and have the potential to provide a lot of local processing
> power which can be used for more complex tasks than simply routing
> traffic over a point-to-point link. Many sysops expressed the wish to
> be able to have access to multiple masters, simultaneously, and hence
> the DMR Gateway was born in 2017. It does complex call routing, and
> almost everything else, bar the position data interpretation.

What would I like?  In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to
communicate with the hams I want to, regardless of network or mode,
using the radios I have,  In essence, think of it like EchoIRLP on
steroids.  I have something close to this with my AllStar node, which
not only can do AllStar, IRLP and Echolink (IRLP/EL via my existing
EchoIRLP node - with all proper lockouts in place), but it's configured
to do DMR (BM), YSF and P25 via a local DVSwitch installation.   I'd
like to be able to run multiple DMR networks eventually.  

The end game is something that performs the role that IP does for data -
providing routing over the top of multiple networks, so any endpoint can
find any other endpoint.

Another issue is audio processing.  I believe in processing the audio as
little as possible.  This philosophy goes back to EchoIRLP (2003-) and
the IRLP/Echolink integrated conference servers (2005-), and results in
the best audio quality with minimum latency.  DV modes, unlike the
analog systems often don't have a "common vocoder", so some amount of
transcoding is unavoidable, but again given the aggressive vocoders in
use, I'd like to keep it to a minimum, while preserving as much metadata
as possible.  Incidentally, this would be handy internally in cross mode
gateways like the one I have in the cloud.

Here's how I see it working.  At the source, the audio is decoded to
PCM, and two audio streams are sent - one in PCM and a second stream in
the original encoded format.  Information about the vocoder in use is
added to the metadata.  Stations receiving the stream examine the
vocoder metadata.  If they natively support the vocoder used, they
simply take the original encoded voice data and use that.  Otherwise the
receiving nodes that can't handle the source vocoder will take the PCM
stream and re-encode that.  In these days of unlimited (or near
unlimited) broadband Internet, the overheads of doing things this way
shouldn't be an issue.   If a viable software implementation of the
D-STAR vocoder comes along, it would still then be possible to have a
"dumb" node linked to a "smart router" running in the cloud, to save
local processing power or bandwidth, if needed.

>  
> In some quarters this development was opposed. I believe that the
> sysop should have the choice on how to route their traffic and so
> development went ahead and it has been enhanced since. It has been a
> huge success.
>  
> I think that the time has come to look at having an open source,
> non-centralised, DMR network. A network where no one person or group
> has control. We already have the beginnings of this with the HBLink
> and with XLX projects. If more people get involved with these projects
> then they will grow and offer more features as time goes on.  I
> haven't played with HBLink yet, but it does interest me.
The only issue I see is avoiding issues like routing loops or malicious
interference (sadly, it does happen).  For the former, it would be ideal
if the network was smart enough to detect loops and then take action to
block the source of problems or break the loop, until it's fixed. 
Otherwise some human oversight would be needed.

I do run an XLX reflector, but keep it standalone, as the very manual
interlinking process isn't compatible with my ADHD (I did play with it
in the early days of XLX).  I'm also somewhat cut off from that
community, because they moved all their internal communication to a web
forum years ago, which is relatively inaccessible to me - too slow and
cumbersome and yet another login to remember to check.
>  
> Some may say, what about integration of commercial repeaters like
> Hyteras and Motorolas? There is already a program available that
> converts the Hytera repeater protocol to the protocol used by the
> MMDVM, and integration of Motorola repeaters is possible all be it
> with a number of programs in series. Maybe someone will rationalise
> this into something simpler.
This could be a use case of the "dumb node" scenario above.
>  
> Things are already moving on this, and I hope that in the future we
> will see such systems appear and then DMR will be free of the tyranny
> of what we have now. Sysops and their users are sovereign and should
> not be dictated to by anybody (the same goes for software developers
> :-) ).


Let's hope for more openness. :)

--
73 de Tony VK3JED/VK3IRL
http://vkradio.com

Why is analog_bridge not open source? 

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 3:19 PM Tony Langdon <vk3jed@...> wrote:

On 26/11/20 3:54 am, Steve N4IRS wrote:
> DMR, after D-Star, is the most political of the digtial voice modes.
> Unlike the other modes, most DMR systems connect to a centralised
> server, known as a "master" and that is responsible for all of the
> talk group routine, personal calls, and position data interpretation
> and forwarding. There are three main centralised systems:
> BrandMeister, DMR+ (known as Phoenix in the UK), and TGIF.
>  
> What these systems have in common is that they are closed source. This
> is not good for the amateur community. There were mutterings about
> them having signed NDAs with Hytera and Motorola to get details of
> their internet connection protocols, which may or may not be true.
> Even if true, why not make the non-NDA parts of the source code open?
>  
> In the commercial world, digital voice repeaters, be they for DMR,
> P25, NXDN, or dPMR have limited abilities within themselves for call
> routing. They do include CPUs of course, but for anything other than
> simple point-to-point links, they are useless. This limitation is fine
> for what they were originally designed for, small centrally controlled
> networks, with or without a dispatching console function. The YCS
> system for System Fusion is looking to do the same for YSF and that is
> why I oppose it.
>  
> This model of a centralised control structure carried through to the
> amateur DMR networks. In its simplest form, a repeater would simply
> have a point-to-point network connection to the master and things
> would be fine. Even with a semi-distributed system, with one or more
> master per country, there is still some central control of the system
> with the power to overrule the decisions made at the local level. Such
> central control is also not conducive to supporting each countries
> requirements, and leads to much used functionality being arbitrarily
> removed. In the extereme case the countries master may also be
> removed. When such things happen you have to ask from where did they
> derive their authority? Who voted for them? Who made the decision and
> how do they know that it is correct?
I'm in agreement with the general idea.  I was involved in EchoIRLP,
which came about simply because people like me simply wanted to be able
to connect to whatever network we wanted.  EchoIRLP also incorporated
features to protect the networks from accidental cross linking, which
was one of the reasons it was readily accepted, once people got their
head around the concept.

While it's great to play with different modes, we do have a real "Tower
of Babel" when it comes to DV modes.  Projects like DV Switch do go a
long way towards mitigating the effect of having multiple incompatible
modes among a relatively small user base. 
>  
> In the amateur world we have gone beyond having dumb repeaters. Most
> MMDVM systems for example have a Raspberry Pi or similar running the
> system, and have the potential to provide a lot of local processing
> power which can be used for more complex tasks than simply routing
> traffic over a point-to-point link. Many sysops expressed the wish to
> be able to have access to multiple masters, simultaneously, and hence
> the DMR Gateway was born in 2017. It does complex call routing, and
> almost everything else, bar the position data interpretation.

What would I like?  In an ideal world, I'd like to be able to
communicate with the hams I want to, regardless of network or mode,
using the radios I have,  In essence, think of it like EchoIRLP on
steroids.  I have something close to this with my AllStar node, which
not only can do AllStar, IRLP and Echolink (IRLP/EL via my existing
EchoIRLP node - with all proper lockouts in place), but it's configured
to do DMR (BM), YSF and P25 via a local DVSwitch installation.   I'd
like to be able to run multiple DMR networks eventually.  

The end game is something that performs the role that IP does for data -
providing routing over the top of multiple networks, so any endpoint can
find any other endpoint.

Another issue is audio processing.  I believe in processing the audio as
little as possible.  This philosophy goes back to EchoIRLP (2003-) and
the IRLP/Echolink integrated conference servers (2005-), and results in
the best audio quality with minimum latency.  DV modes, unlike the
analog systems often don't have a "common vocoder", so some amount of
transcoding is unavoidable, but again given the aggressive vocoders in
use, I'd like to keep it to a minimum, while preserving as much metadata
as possible.  Incidentally, this would be handy internally in cross mode
gateways like the one I have in the cloud.

Here's how I see it working.  At the source, the audio is decoded to
PCM, and two audio streams are sent - one in PCM and a second stream in
the original encoded format.  Information about the vocoder in use is
added to the metadata.  Stations receiving the stream examine the
vocoder metadata.  If they natively support the vocoder used, they
simply take the original encoded voice data and use that.  Otherwise the
receiving nodes that can't handle the source vocoder will take the PCM
stream and re-encode that.  In these days of unlimited (or near
unlimited) broadband Internet, the overheads of doing things this way
shouldn't be an issue.   If a viable software implementation of the
D-STAR vocoder comes along, it would still then be possible to have a
"dumb" node linked to a "smart router" running in the cloud, to save
local processing power or bandwidth, if needed.

>  
> In some quarters this development was opposed. I believe that the
> sysop should have the choice on how to route their traffic and so
> development went ahead and it has been enhanced since. It has been a
> huge success.
>  
> I think that the time has come to look at having an open source,
> non-centralised, DMR network. A network where no one person or group
> has control. We already have the beginnings of this with the HBLink
> and with XLX projects. If more people get involved with these projects
> then they will grow and offer more features as time goes on.  I
> haven't played with HBLink yet, but it does interest me.
The only issue I see is avoiding issues like routing loops or malicious
interference (sadly, it does happen).  For the former, it would be ideal
if the network was smart enough to detect loops and then take action to
block the source of problems or break the loop, until it's fixed. 
Otherwise some human oversight would be needed.

I do run an XLX reflector, but keep it standalone, as the very manual
interlinking process isn't compatible with my ADHD (I did play with it
in the early days of XLX).  I'm also somewhat cut off from that
community, because they moved all their internal communication to a web
forum years ago, which is relatively inaccessible to me - too slow and
cumbersome and yet another login to remember to check.
>  
> Some may say, what about integration of commercial repeaters like
> Hyteras and Motorolas? There is already a program available that
> converts the Hytera repeater protocol to the protocol used by the
> MMDVM, and integration of Motorola repeaters is possible all be it
> with a number of programs in series. Maybe someone will rationalise
> this into something simpler.
This could be a use case of the "dumb node" scenario above.
>  
> Things are already moving on this, and I hope that in the future we
> will see such systems appear and then DMR will be free of the tyranny
> of what we have now. Sysops and their users are sovereign and should
> not be dictated to by anybody (the same goes for software developers
> :-) ).


Let's hope for more openness. :)

--
73 de Tony VK3JED/VK3IRL
http://vkradio.com

On 27/11/20 8:20 am, Patrick Perdue wrote:

As I understand it, you can set up a private P25 reflector which is
available to anyone who uses the pi-star host files, thus, no need to
link to a public reflector. This is what I plan to do. I will probably
also get zero users, but at least I know that coming in.

You can do that, or you can setup your own public reflector.  You just
have to ask to get it listed in the public P25Hosts file.  I did this
for 50535.

Here's a bit of advice, take it for what it's worth. 
If you're thinking of linking your other modes to a currently active P25 Reflector, don't. You will be chastised to no end and probably banned from that reflector for life.

The only solution you have is a P25Gateway and P25Reflector with a private TG. I did that for a while and had 0 users. I provided instructions on how to update the P25Hosts.txt files on their hotspots but I guess that was more work than they wanted to do. In the end I took down the reflector and gateway and just told them to use their hotspots in P252DMR mode and connect to my XLX reflector. I have a interlink to BM3103 on the XLX. Now I have P25 users and the meta data is not an issue.

I read elsewhere that Brandmeister Hotspot Users must configure hotspot security password to continue using Brandmeister.  This affect masters 3101, 3102 and 3103 and I assume many other masters. This starts to take affect on Nov 30, 2020.  I have both an Android to DMR and Allstar to DMR bridges running as well as a couple DMR hotspots and a MMDVM DMR repeater on Brandmeister..  Do I need to add a security password to my Android to DMR bridge that I use with DV Switch and to my Allstar to DMR bridge in order to stay logged into Brandmeister, and if yes, how do I do that?

If I need to ask this in a subgroup, please let me know which one.

Thanks,
73,
Steve_WB8GRS

So,
you have D-Star, DMR and AllStar.
If you used AllStar to mix you could keep the number of vocoders to two and only have one transcoder. For the audio, you would have 2 private nodes. The first node would be DMR and pointed at TGIF. The second node would be D-Star and pointed at XLX.  As you said in your first message, you issue would then be metadata.

Steve


On 11/25/20 7:32 PM, Patrick Perdue wrote:

I'm not great at writing out flows.

My setup currently doesn't use ircDDBGateway, since that's all handled at the XLX reflector end. So, it goes like this.

Allstar <-> AB <-> HBLink <-> MB <-> XLXD (DMR, since XLX is also handling a BM interlink and YSF traffic) <-> ambed (connected to the XLX reflector) <-> TGIF.

I'm sure I screwed that up.

So basically, native AMBE traffic is transcoded to analog using the MD380-emu vocoder back to Allstar. DStar is transcoded through the pair of ThumnDV's on the reflector, which is then sent to MD380emu and then Allstar. Between DMR or YSF and DStar, this is fine, but from Allstar to DStar, it's going through another AMBE transcode before A_B sees it, so more latency and lower quality audio.

If I connect to the reflector directly as DStar, then use ASL to connect to the other modes, perhaps on another module of the reflector and HBLink, then DMR-YSF would only see the call specified in A_B, correct?


On 11/25/2020 7:18 PM, Steve N4IRS wrote:

I don't see how there are 2 vocoders to get from AllStar to D-Star. The flow would be:
AllStar <-> AB <-> MB <-> ircDDBGateway <-> XLX for D-Star.
You could drop the ircDDBGateway and go to XLX DMR.

Steve

On 11/25/20 7:14 PM, Patrick Perdue wrote:

Sure, but I'm currently going through two of them to get from Allstar to DStar.

I'm just wondering if there's a way to drop one of them out and still maintain metadata. I could directly connect A_B and MMDVM_Bridge to the XLX reflector and only direct DStar traffic to the module, and audio between DStar and the other digital modes should be about the same as it is now, but audio from Allstar to DStar has one less generation of vocoding, but then I lose metadata between the digital modes. At least, this is how I understand it.


On 11/25/2020 6:55 PM, Steve N4IRS wrote:

Patrick,
Either way, you have to go through a vocoder to go from analog to D-Star Same for P25, you still have to go through a vocoder.

Steve

On 11/25/20 6:28 PM, Patrick Perdue wrote:

Hi:

I have a system that incorporates ASL, XLX, HBLink and DVSwitch. I'm toying with the idea of adding P25.

Currently, DStar is handled by XLX and a pair of transcoders connected to the XLX reflector, not DVSwitch. I would like to connect ASL directly to the XLX reflector in DStar mode, so that the audio to and from DStar to ASL is not transcoded through AMBE, but still pass metadata to DStar from the other digital modes. Is this at all possible? Similar question in regards to P25.

Basically, I want to do the least amount of transcoding possible to and from analog, while maintaining the greatest compatibility across digital modes. What I have now works, but I'd love to get rid of that extra layer of transcoding between analog and DStar without sacrificing metadata.

Thanks.

It seems to have fixed itself after a few times of opening and closing the application. Now I'm wondering how to add my private reflector to the list on USRP Client for P25. I have added it to the P25Hosts.txt file on the DV_Switch Server, but it doesn't show in the list on the client. Any ideas?