[whitehouse3]

I wonder how common is EchoLink among other newer protocols like C4FM? How hard is it to spin up a low-power repeater with this and save a few thousand dollars on a dedicated box? Would that run afoul of FCC code in the US?

Separately, it’s nice to see Ham Radio on the front page. Amateur Radio and hacking share the same goals, although monetization is less prevalent among radio guys. Maybe there’s lots of HAMs here and we don’t talk about it?

[jbarrozo]

I'm a ham myself. EchoLink is still considered one of the most reliable VOIP in my opinion because being it's analog at its input and output. The downside of it is, it's entirely made for windows OS. This come svxlink to the rescue for linux guys. C4FM is one of the branded protocols out there; d-star, dmr, P25 etc. If you don't have the radio to do this protocol, you're out of the game.

SVXLINK is just a controller running on a raspberry pi, you still need to connect a radio for its rx and tx. I'm using low power chinese-made ht to it, and it act as my personal repeater at home.

[hibby]

One thing that's become quite common here in the UK is multimode networks - bridging gateways for C4FM, D*, DMR and analogue into a single network 'room' - [CQ-UK](https://www.cq-uk.co.uk/) and [hubnet](https://hubnetwork.uk/) are examples.

These use software like SVXLink, [Allstar](https://www.allstarlink.org/) and [XLX Reflector](https://github.com/LX3JL/xlxd) with AMBE hardware at the server to handle transcoding between the proprietary networks.

It's all pretty cool!

[hibby]

... oh great none of my markdown worked :D