Bridging XLX to Wires-X

 For some strange reason I decided to stand up an XLX Reflector.  I followed The Modern Ham YouTube video on how to accomplish this.  That was the easy part.

I have been on Fusion for 9+ years, and have installed a DR1-X and DR2-X repeater.  We have no internet at the repeater site, so I have had a RF Wires-X node running for 8.5 years at my QTH.

Activity had been sporadic, except for a few early adopters.  There are a bunch of FM repeaters in the area.  Many of them are controlled by a few very dedicated and generous owners.  They have spent a lot of time and money gathering excellent surplus commercial equipment, getting good repeater sites, and building up controllers and infrastructure.  For the most part, they aren't too interested in digital at the moment.

So digital voice has been slow to be adopted in my area.  It seems many have bought Fusion radios, only to not use the digital capability very often, if at all.

So as a interesting project, though hundreds if not thousands of hams around the world have done this, I thought maybe I would try an XLX Reflector and see what we could do with it.

For me, the main thing I wanted be be able to do, was bridge the XLX server with Wires-X.  I had bridged YSF to wires-x before with my Openspot 1, but the XLX server might give additional possibilities.  So  I got the server going, decided to use my OpenSpot 1 for the bridge, and I ordered a Pi Zero 2W and an MMDVM board to build another hotspot for my access.  I had a Wires-X PDN node already available.

All went well at first, I used WPSD with the MMDVM hotspot, it came to life no problem.  I setup the Openspot to work with my PDN node. Initial tests were good, I could transmit into my MMDVM and I could see myself on the PDN wires-X node.  My repeater node that was connected to the same room would also keyup the repeater.  It was looking good, but I knew nothing about DMR.  So I started reading and researching.  I thought that to test properly, I should get a DMR radio.  So I ordered an Anytone D878uvii.  I didn't need the + version.  So I got that and started testing.  It also seemed to work.

But I needed to test coming back to my radio.  I got Steve, KA1CNF to help.  Essentially, he could hear me, but I could not hear him.  I won't go into the details, as I probably can't remember all of them.  There were several days of testing, searching, retesting...  

Finally I thought maybe the Openspot 1 couldn't deal with XLX.  XLX came around after the Openspot 1, especially YSF capability of XLX.  Since my first MMDVM hotspot worked so well, and I was impressed by WPSD, I ordered another, hoping maybe it might solve my problem.

It didn't, at least at first.  I had terrible problems getting the new hotspot to work.  I just couldn't ever get the dashboard to come up.  I spent probably a week on it, including getting first another Pi Zero 2W, then another MMDVM.  I can't even say for sure what fixed it, but eventually, I finally got it to come up.

After getting it all configured, I still had problems.  Actually, worse problems.  I could not transmit into my hotspot and see myself coming thru into my PDN wires-X node.

It seemed that despite many people doing similar setups, no one has documented the process, at least that I could find.  Like it is a big secret

Again, a few more days of searching and reading, and I found two things that were the key to getting it working.  One of them I did find in a forum post, that was 6 years old.  That got me half the way there.  The other fix I found by trial and error, as these MMDVM host settings don't seem to be explained anywhere.  Most of he time, the default is good, but this is a somewhat unique situation.

So in case this might help anyone else, if you are using a MMDVM hotspot running with WPSD, attached to an XLX reflector server, and it is transmitting to your PDN node to bridge to Wires-X, here are the two changes that worked for me (save your configuration first):

  • In WPSD, go to Admin menu.
  • Go to Advanced menu
  • Go to Full Editors > MMDVMHost
  • Scroll Down to System Fusion section
  • Find entry: SelfOnly=1
  • Change the 1 to a 0.
  • Find entry:RemoteGateway=0
  • Change the 0 to a 1
  • Apply the changes
I haven't used Pi-Star, but I assume it is similar, but don't know the selections to get there.

This worked for me, maybe it might help you.  The XLX reflector is even transcoding DMR<>YSF.  I know D-Star needs a transcoding server, but before I invest in that, I need to see some usage with the modes more popular here.

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