JPS NXU-2 to Zello Work

[mswin_blake]

Currently working with a county that is wanting to move their PTT VOIP stuff off of a KODIAK based system that is costing them a lot every month to Zello Work which cost them nothing. This system is mainly used as RX only for members of the fire department who do not get a radio and for department administration when they are traveling outside the county as the statewide P25 network does not allow roaming of talkgroups. I am curious if anyone has done this before and was successful with their endeavor, we have 3 different talk groups that would need setup to this system. All radios are APX 1500’s connected to a JPS ACU-1000. Thanks for any help in advance!

 

[phonebuff]

If you read down through this forum topic (RoIP) you will find lot's of Zello threads...

A simple solution would be to wire a Zello LMR device to an ACU 1000 slot instead of trying to use their proprietary RoIP protocol. Either way you will tie up a card slot.

You might also look at Wave on Cloud or what ever the P25 version is called but the dollars may be similar to the Kodiak solution.

 

[mswin_blake]

Yes, Wave on Cloud is just as expensive as our current ESCHAT solution. We really don’t have any additional budget for this so any extra cost to move over will have to be extremely minimum. The county has ended our contract with ESCHAT due to vendor changes and cost so our current setup will essentially become inactive come Jan. 2021.

 

[ButteredPopcorn]

If it’s for RX only you could go SDR route and direct audio from SDR to zello. I am in the process of doing the same thing on P25 trunking. I set up DSDPLUS pushing audio to virtual cables to zello. Takes a bit to set up. Every TG gets its own SDR dongle and an instance of DSD with all other TGs locked out. Rough but gets the job done. We also don’t have the funds for anything fancy so other than SDR cost it’s free. One computer does it all, doesn’t tie up any radios.

One thing to keep an eye on is I recommend you make the RX channels “listen only” via zello work admin settings. We are still testing but early on we had members using zello instead of their radio to try and talk to dispatch.

 

[tuckerm]

I know you have Zello Work, but for those out there that want to try this, you can use Zello Free in a gateway configuration. There's a tutorial out there on how to change the free download to the Gateway version. Its a config file change. I use this to pipe RX audio to a channel as well.