Connecting the RIU to Cisco Call Manager

Surprisingly easy to connect the RIU using Cisco Call Manager....

I recently visited a client to integrate radio over IP into a system they were developing that provided telephone and video conferencing to a vehicle over satelite. Not knowing the exact configuration of the other equipment involved I brought my RIU for connection to the radios and also a VS-64, (see earlier entry), for push-to-talk access.

As often happens during customer tests and demonstrations plans changed upon my arrival. The customer had configured Cisco Call Manager in his vehicle and this was connected by a satelite link to a remote building which had another Cisco Call Manager installation. They wanted to add the radio as an extension on the telephone system so that they could make calls from phones in the vehicle or in the remote building and talk to a field worker with a portable radio.

I hadn't planned on this, but since the RIU has a SIP user agent I suggested we could possibly set up the radio as a SIP extension. After 10 minutes of configuration changes we had added the RIU to their network and set up a SIP dial peer on the Call Manager installation. We could make calls from the IP phones, and wi-fi phones on the network. I was quite surprised at how simple this was and how good the audio quality was.

We were using military SINCGARS radios and using voice detection within the RIU to generate the PTT signal.