Network settings

These two switches are what make this a working DMR server. The first lets hotspots and Homebrew repeaters log in. The second carries what one of them transmits to the others on the same talkgroup, and to any bridge or link you set up. With forwarding off, stations still log in and appear here, but nobody hears anybody. Bridges, links and Zello still do nothing until you configure them, so forwarding on its own relays only between stations on the same talkgroup.

These appear on the join page you send to a member. The address is what their hotspot points at, so it must be reachable from outside your network — a LAN address here produces a join page that works for nobody.

The numbers members dial. A talkgroup number is the same on both sides of a hotspot — 2 is 2, 11 is 11 — so nothing here rewrites anything. A hotspot carrying only this network needs no rewrite rules at all, and a talkgroup added here works without touching any Pi.

Who this instance says it is when it links to another network. A blank callsign appears on the far end's dashboard as an unidentified station. Every link uses these unless it is given something of its own, so they are stated once rather than repeated per link. Coordinates are decimal degrees, the same as a hotspot announces, and are optional — leave them out and this station is simply not plotted.

Every member shares one password unless a directory is named here. With one, a member can be given their own, and removing that member is deleting one file — nobody else reconfigures anything. Without one, removing a member means a new shared password and every remaining member changing their hotspot on the same evening. Members without a password of their own keep using the shared one, so this can be adopted a member at a time. Passwords are issued on the access control page; the directory only says where they live.

Off, every member receives every talkgroup this network carries. That is right for a small club and wrong for a busy one: a hotspot has a single timeslot, so a member sitting on their local talkgroup cannot also take a statewide net. Turned on, a member hears a talkgroup once they transmit on it, and it lapses when they stop. Turn it on carefully — until somebody keys up they hear nothing, so a talkgroup everyone must always have needs pinning to each peer first, which is not yet editable here.

This is a log of members' activity — who transmitted, what they called, and when — readable by any administrator. It exists because a net control station uses the last-heard list to recover a check-in they missed, and fifty entries in memory survive neither the evening nor the deploy that follows it. Keeping nothing is a real answer for a club that would rather not hold one. No audio is stored: a record of who spoke is not a recording of what they said.

Program it as a group call. A private call is recorded and cannot be replayed usefully: DMR carries the call's addressing inside the audio burst, so a radio mutes a replay that is not addressed to it, and rewriting that means decoding the burst — which QSP deliberately does not do. The talkgroup must also be one the member's hotspot forwards; 9990 is outside the usual pass-through range and often needs a rule adding.

The master ID must not be a repeater's own ID. A repeater will not register with a master announcing the ID it uses itself, and it retries silently with nothing on either side saying why. QSP refuses a configuration that does it. The colour code must match the repeater's, and the slot bit setting decides which timeslot a transmission is understood to be on — if audio arrives and is not carried, that setting is the first thing to change.

This is P25 over IP, not a Motorola repeater's V.24 link. Enabling it makes QSP a P25 reflector that hotspots and P25 gateways can link to, carrying their audio between each other untouched. A Motorola repeater connects over a V.24 card rather than over a network, which is a different link with its own panel below. P25 traffic does not reach DMR and will not: P25 carries IMBE and DMR carries AMBE+2, so passing one through the other would decode and re-encode the audio and everybody would hear the difference.

Calls cross both ways between repeaters and P25 gateways. A Motorola P25 repeater's V.24 card speaks to a Cisco router's serial port, and the router carries those frames here over TCP. The repeater asks to open its link twice a second, expects to be asked in turn, then introduces itself and expects to hear a keepalive every few seconds. Turning this on makes QSP do all of that, carry each call a repeater hears to every linked P25 gateway and every other linked repeater, and send each call from a gateway to every linked repeater to transmit, with the audio untouched. One call at a time is carried: a station that keys while another is talking is counted and not carried. A Quantar is what this has been proven on. A GTR 8000 has the same V.24 interface and is expected to work; none has been tried.