Astro Spectra Consolette and Wireless Bridge

[NSPD]

I have been doing some research into using a wireless "bridge" to link an Astro Spectra Consolette to one or more RCH3000 handsets around my residence. I only need to make a run of about 30 feet, but in my situation I unfortunately cannot run a cable.

Has anyone tried this?

[Will]

There is an adapter that converts to Ethernet that can feed wireless. There are other interfaces available that may help.

[NSPD]

Will,

I have seen those, and they look like they would work in this situation, but I am concerned about audio and control delays. I was hoping that someone here had attempted something like this and might be able to offer some insight before I make an investment.

[515]

Even though the RCH3000 or MC3000 desksets use CAT-5 cable, they're not ethernet devices. All 8 wires on the cable are used, one pair for audio in each direction, and one pair for control data in each direction. So typical ethernet bridges or media converters won't do any good.

[Bill_G]

NSPD hasn't said whether it's a tone or local control RCH3000. If he is using tone control, then yes - latency through a voip / roip adapter (like an Raytheon NXU-2A) will clobber the tones some of the time causing intermittent key up. If he is using local control, he can use hardware E&M keying to control the station. There will be some delay in the voice audio, but unnoticeable if he keeps the Spectra speaker turned off.

[firemedic]

Don't the RCH3000's and DGT9000's use the SB9600 protocol for local control? So no real option will exist to do what you want to the best of my knowledge unless you roll your own and decode the SB9600 protocol or figure a way to encode it over TCP/IP which could be done but would take a good bit of work and probably a hefty sum paid to motorola for the protocol rights. The audio would be the easy part.

[515]

I'm not aware of the RCH3000 or MC3000 desksets being available in tone or local control format. All the ones I've ever used have used the SB9600 data to display the channel names and emulate full W9 control head functionality at the deskset. The MC1000 and MC2000's are tone remotes which look similar to the MC3000s. I think GAITronics made some tone/local remotes that looked similar to the RCH3000s, but were branded with their name instead of Motorola.

They're hard to find and/or expensive, but there are external modems for the RCH3000's and internal modem cards that can go in the L3208 junction boxes for the MC3000's which will turn the SB9600 data into an analog signal that can go on phone lines. I think you need two pairs for this setup--one for audio, and the other for the control data. In both cases, these modems are designed to be used with the junction boxes, so you'd need at least two of those. But that might be your best bet if you really wanted to do this...

In the past, I had looked into some devices to convert these RCH3000/MC3000 deskset links to fiber, but never found anything that would be relatively cheap and plug-n-play.

[NSPD]

Thanks for the info guys... I have not purchased any equipment yet as I am trying to develop a plan to overcome the issues that I have at this location. A wireless solution for the desksets seems like the only option at this point unfortunately.

[d119]

I'm not aware of the RCH3000 or MC3000 desksets being available in tone or local control format. All the ones I've ever used have used the SB9600 data to display the channel names and emulate full W9 control head functionality at the deskset. The MC1000 and MC2000's are tone remotes which look similar to the MC3000s.

Exactly correct. MC3000/RCH3000 are DIGITAL ONLY desksets. MC2500 is a multi-line tone remote deskset, MC2000 is a single-line MDC deskset, and MC1000 can be DC or Tone or Local and is a very basic deskset.

[Bill_G]

Digital only. Does it use four wire serial similar to RS422? NSPD might be able to use a serial to eth converter available on the web, and it might work depending on the forgiveness of the timing requirements.