our network has a raspberry PBX server at one of our mountain top sites. most of our group has a direct connection to the node that it is connected to. a little further south is another mountain top node for us in the southern part of the valley. I connect to this second node. with the mountains and valleys here, we have more of 2 hub and spoke designs, and not so much "mesh" these 2 sites are connected with a stock Ubiquiti firmware bridge, here is the issue I am seeing. many of us are using Cisco SPA504G IP phones. the guys on teh north end of the county can talk to each other just fine, but If I try to contact any of them, I hear no audio coming back from them, but they hear me just fine. I get this with 2 different phones, so I know its not the hardware.
At winter field day, we set up with a line of sight path to the Mesh node about 5 miles away and I configured 3 phones for the 3 different sites. While logging worked great with the mesh network, the Phones were having the same issue of one way audio. this tells me that it has nothing to do with adding a few extra hops to the network. can any of you think of something I could have missed or done incorrectly when setting up these phones?
At winter field day, we set up with a line of sight path to the Mesh node about 5 miles away and I configured 3 phones for the 3 different sites. While logging worked great with the mesh network, the Phones were having the same issue of one way audio. this tells me that it has nothing to do with adding a few extra hops to the network. can any of you think of something I could have missed or done incorrectly when setting up these phones?
If so it would likely be a port forward problem.
Can you describe what this is, what it's doing for you and what you want it to do for you?
As KG6JEI points out, if there's any mangling of sip packets, you could very well have one-way audio. Normally, the Mesh network handles sip OK, no matter how many links are involved. The key is that the packets are kept intact from one end of the connection to the other. However, if this "firmware bridge" is doing something to the packets, such as changing source or destination addresses, this could very well be the heart of your problem.
If this is truly the case and using this device is your only option, you may need to have a second pbx to serve your southern users. Connecting the two pbx's together will be an IAX type of trunk which is resiliant to this type of behavior. If you wish to pursue this solution, please contact me off-line.
One other thing comes to mind. You mention 2 different phones. Are these simply two different physical phones or are they two phones from different vendors? If you find that all phones of a common type/vendor don't work but different vendor's phones do work, that would suggest some sort of configuration problem rather than a network problem.
73, Mark, N2MH