Building a Brandmeister to AllStar Bridge

This guide was created in late 2024 as a reference for a friend, documenting their journey as they went along. Nothing here is new, but perhaps these notes will be helpful to someone else as most of the examples are either long, videos, or hidden away in readmes and mailing lists.

Phase 1: Setup an AllStar Node

At this point, you should be using the ASL3 image. Follow their guides. It’s good modern stuff.

Assuming you’re hosting this somewhere on the cloud or on a private VM host, take a snapshot here. That way if you goof up, you can go back.

Phase 2: Setup DVSwitch

Architecture in review

Now, a brief note about the architecture that DVSwitch uses internally. There are a few sub-components that it uses that we need to be concerned with:

md380-emu, which is literally the firmware of an TYT MD-380 radio running in an emulator with software data frames piped in with DMR and audio pipes coming out for analog audio (and vice versa); there’s no configuration to do here, it just needs to run on the local machine; this isn’t actually DVSwitch, it’s a project that fellow Tennesseean Travis Goodspeed put together, and if this kind of thing is interesting to you you should buy his book
mmdvm_bridge (on Github in a token, carefree, “use GitHub instead of a package manager” kind of way) which takes an mmdvm-compatible radio network like brandmeister and handles connecting to it and making it accessible with a known common protocol for data
analog_bridge (on Github, same song and dance as above, though there is a bit more in the open source space here to give credit for) which facilitates taking that known common protocol from the mmdvm bridge, interfacing with md380-emu, and then plumbing the pipes to a protocol that looks like a USRP interface to Allstar

Outside of DVSwitch, we also need to configure Allstar to talk to the analog bridge’s USRP interface. This is pretty simple, and I suggest taking this as a starting point.

Configuring app_rpt to talk to analog_bridge

Coming soon

Setting up analog_bridge, mmdvm_bridge, and md380-emu