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This is long overdue, but I think it is worth opening a discussion on EchoIRLP's future. EchoIRLP has been a huge success. It started out as a project to solve a need that some of us had. At that time, I had one antenna and was tying up 2 radio ports with IRLP and Echolink, because I wanted RF access to both networks. However, that limited what I could do outside of Echolink and IRLP. EchoIRLP was a solution to that problem. At the time, some other people, including Marcus WA2DCI had a similar vision, and we all joined forces to work on the project. Skip WB6YMH who developed tbd and tlb was of great assistance, adding features which were either specific to EchoIRLP (e.g. Speak Freely support), or had multiple uses including EchoIRLP, such as the scripting interfaces. Skip also fielded a heap of bug reports from people like myself, and promptly fixed the issues found. :-)
The first EchoIRLP node went live in early 2004 on IRLP node 6390, and the rest is history. :)
Now to the future. EchoIRLP has a major issue. It currently uses thebridge (tbd). The issue here is tbd is the same software that Echolink conferences use. around 2 years ago, Echolink started strictily enforcing their node ID policies, in preparation for charging for conference IDs. A key aspect of this enfoecement is that conferences with -R or -L IDs were removed from their system. Because EchoIRLP uses the same software as a "real" conference, any node configured for more than one connection at a time (i.e. MaxConferenceClients > 2) was seen by the servers as a "conference", and removed by the admins for having a -L or -R callsign. Why single access conferences still work is one of the many EchoIRLP specific features of tbd which had this beneficial side effect.
There is a fix for this problem, but to make it easily used, it requires a few changes to the EchoIRLP scripts. Skip produced a second package called thelinkbox (tlb). This is effectively tbd with an integrated repeater controller added. In theory, tlb is a drop in replacement for tbd. It uses exactly the same configuration file (unless you eant to add RF functionality directly to tlb), and the same scripting interface. However, some parts of the EchoIRLP scripts assume "tbd" is running, not "tlb", and will fail, so these need to be rewritten to be more generic. The issue is finding the time to make the changes. I also no longer have access to a "stock" EchoIRLP node. My node is a highly experimental system running a non standard configuration, one which is not appropriate to let out in the wild.
Another feature that I have integrated into my own EchoIRLP node is the "Rebel Base" remote base controller. This is an additional set of scripts, which uses tlb, along with Hamlib and some GNU utilities to turn an attached radio into a remote base. This could be a secondary radio (especially if you're running EchoIRLP on a repeater), or the main node radio (frequency agile simplex node anyone? :) ). Rebel Base is fairly self contained, and can be added to any node running tlb (audio routing is simpler with tlb).
And the use of tlb also makes it simpler to integrate streaming audio for listeners.
Thoughts anyone?
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<p>This is long overdue, but I think it is worth opening a discussion on<br>
EchoIRLP's future. EchoIRLP has been a huge success. It started out as a<br>
project to solve a need that some of us had. At that time, I had one antenna<br>
and was tying up 2 radio ports with IRLP and Echolink, because I wanted RF<br>