Hi! I wanted to show you guys today,
Something I've done just for a bit of fun
I've made a crosslink between zello and the walkie talkie here.
So I can talk on my phone
and receive it on the walkie talkie
I've just set it up now
so it's not fine tuned or anything
but it seems to be working alright.
I'll show you, if I talk here on the walkie talkie
it should come up on the phone
1, 2, 3 audio test
There you go
and if I talk on the phone
1, 2, 3, testing
Oh, I had the volume down
If I turn that up again
1, 2, 3 testing
It does do a little bit of the audio coming back through on here
but I don't think that can be avoided because I'm using VOX on this
I'll show you how it is set up
over here, I've got my scanner, set on channel 5 with DCS 46.
and that's sending the audio through here into the mic of the computer
and this radio here is on VOX, you can see the VOX in there just above my finger
and the audio that comes out of the computer, there, goes along that cable through a converter
to convert it [the connector] to 2.5mm
and in to here, which broadcasts it
and on the computer I've got zello open and I've got it set to VOX on a channel
and whenever it hears any audio from here [the scanner]
it will play that on the zello channel
and the same the other way round, whenever this [the walkie talkie] hears any audio on the zello channel it will play it over the radio channel
So I'll just show you it in action again
1, 2, 3
It works quite nicely.
and this is a really cheap way to implement those systems that you see that, they want to charge you for this solution
but here is a free way to do it.
1, 2, 3 Zello test
That can get a bit annoying
Zello test 1, 2, 3
and this is very useful
if you just want to have people talking on their smartphones to a radio group
maybe people who wouldn't be in the coverage of the radio system
Next I'm going to go over to a screen cast and show you on the computer how it's set up in Zello
So here we have zello, and here's how you can set up the VOX
Once you've set up the VOX you click this lock thing here
and if you don't have the VOX turned on then it will transmit continuously on the channel
but you don't really want to do that. You want to have it on VOX, so
if you go into tools, and options, you can go into VOX and you can set the settings here
but you have to click enable VOX for handsfree
make sure that box is ticked, and then you can go over to the VOX settings
you have to adjust the activation threshold
so that it only activates when someone talks
because otherwise if you have it too sensitive it will activate all the time
and when nobody is talking so that will just annoy all of the users
and if you have it too high up, it won't activate at all
or it will only activate when there is a really really loud noise but it won't activate when people are talking normally
so that would be useless
then you have to set the trigger time.
The trigger time is the time it takes for a transmission to trigger the VOX to start transmitting on Zello
and the relaxation time is how long it takes before it stops
so if there is silence for this many milliseconds
then it will stop transmitting on the channel
So after you have applied those settings, you just click on the channel you want
click that [the lock symbol] and it's ready to go.
So that's how you can make a crosslink between Zello and PMR446
you can use it for any type of radio system really
as long as you have got some way of keying up the radio
I hope this has been useful for someone but for me it was just a bit of a fun project to do.
Thanks for watching!