Simple voter

The Simple Voter - System Operator's Guide

This feature requires that the USB radio devices on the remote voting receivers are connected directly to each voting receiver's discriminator/quadrature detector output. The receiver at the Master/Transmitting site can be one of the voting receivers. GPS receivers and additional hardware is not required.

Signal strength reporting must be turned on for all voting devices in /etc/asterisk/urd.conf as follows:

sendvoter=1 ; 0=default, no voter rssi, 1=enable voter

In the rpt.conf [nodes] context, voting receiver nodes must be identified by IP address or FQDN and have the text ",VOTE" at the end after "NONE". For example,

[nodes]
...
5101 = radio@5101mycall.dyndns.org:4569/5101,NONE,VOTE
...

[5100]
...
votertype=1 ; 0=default, no voting, 1=voter repeater, 2=voter receiver
votermode=2 ; 0=default, no voting, 1=voter one-shot, 2=voter continuous
votermargin=10 ; 10=default sets signal margin to vote a new winner
startup_macro=*25101 ; example to connect voter receiver in monitor only mode
...

After testing, change the startup_macro to make a permanent monitor connection.

Voting reciever nodes should be receive only with no transmitters and with private node numbers and they should not attempt to register or report to the AllStar network. Therefore you must edit "/etc/asterisk/iax_registrations_custom.conf" and "/etc/asterisk/rpt.conf" accordingly. In /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf comment out the status posting lines:

; program and options to send information to stats server
;statpost_program=/usr/bin/wget,-q,--output-document=/dev/null
;statpost_url=http://stats.allstarlink.org/uhandler.php

With this feature, in addition to the usual repeater with voting receivers configuration, you can construct things like a repeater with voted sectored/directional Rx antennas and receivers or a centrally located transmit site with no duplexer/receiver and one or more voted remote receivers.

Note that this feature simply selects the receiver with the best signal strength. You can make some adjustments (which will be described later) to equalize the IP connection delays but there will be a noticeable transition between receivers. So it's not perfect, but for most applications, it's good enough considering the cost and complexity.

Good Luck and 73,

Steven Henke, W9SH