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Hello everyone, I am a new GRMS licensee and this is my first post on this forum. So, it’s good to meet you all. I have been a computer network engineer for 23 years, worked in video streaming and conferencing, telemedicine, backend systems of all types, and I am now venturing out in the mystical world of RF. I have had very limited experience with the RF side of 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi and 4GLTE systems, and have loved two-way since I was a kid, but now I have the budget to really get into it. I have been researching how to link GMRS and stumbled onto this site and the grms.network videos. Then I looked into what the amateur radios folks were doing with Allstar, EchoLink, and the like. I am pretty handy with a soldering iron, know enough to be dangerous with Linux, and understand the IP side of it very well. So, I thought I would try my hand at building a deployable linked repeater system. What would be the use case, you say? Mostly because I am a geek and I think it would be cool. Beyond that, I can see it would be useful for events like marathons and adventure races, desert rally races, etc where someone was traveling in a linear distance and aid and comfort stations along the route needed to maintain comms. Distance in the desert, the ability to address terrain obstacles in adventure races in the mountains. That kind of thing. You could set up at night points along the route and blanket it with linked coverage. Or, that’s my idea for it anyway. A lot of it is pretty straight forward, and I have really appreciated the information many have shared about GMRS linking. I have a good handle on the I{P requirements and how to use LTE to provide the private IP control and repeater interconnection network. But a couple of things have really hung me up. How to interface the radio hardware to the node computer. There are some great videos online about how to modify a BF-888s to create a hotspot node, and I can extrapolate the connection to radios that have a 14pin, 9DB, or 25DB control connections, But how can you get into other mobile radios at 50W that don’t have a control port in the back? I have bought a KG-1000g to play with and I think it’s built in repeater capability through a control cable to an identical radio would keep the system pretty compact. You would need a duplexer, but not a repeater controller? So, the question is how to wire in to what the URIx (ideally) or modded USB sound card needs? If it can be done on the BF-888s, then I think it’s a question worth asking. The other thing is the Allstar server backend. Is it in the node package, or is that a separate package? If I can get these two issues moving, I think I can make something cool. At any rate, I will be around if anyone can use what I know. I am happy to tell you what I know and tell you if I don’t know.