[asterisk-users] Re: Sipura SPA-3000 vs Sangoma A200

[David Cook]

I echo (pun intended) Rich's response. The Spa3k is ~ok~ but echo has 
always been a problem for my home office. The A200D works flawlessly.
> I'm looking to set up a home-office PBX/Asterisk lab using a VIA EPIA motherboard as an always on, low powered solution.
>   
I have seen an A200D in a soekris 4801 (http://www.soekris.com) box 
running astlinux. I say "saw", because it was at a show and the box 
wasn't plugged in. It was Jim VanMeggelen - one of the authors of the 
O'Reilly Asterisk book. You might want to drop him a line. The Sangoma 
has a 4-pin molex for power supply connection to augment the PCI bus 
when you need to generate ring voltage for FXS ports. The soekris (by 
default) won't give you that so either you put FXS external or you 
figure out how to get +5/+12 VDC to the Sangoma. Actually, you may want 
to check with Sangoma ... maybe you only need 5 or 12 but they just 
match the molex to be compliant with all PC hardware.
> I am trying to find out the differences between a solution using an external ATA (like the Sipura SPA-3000) or an internal PCI card (like the Sangoma A200 with 2 FXO 2 FXS ports).
>
>   
The nice thing about the SPA3K is that upon registration failure or 
power failure the FXO & FXS ports get hardwired together so you get a 
power safe environment.

The nice thing about the Sangoma is that it supports ring contexts by 
distinctive ring. I believe this is also called Ident-a-call in many 
places. For a home office this is great. I have a second number that 
rings my primary line with a different ring pattern for ~ 4.00/mth. 
rather than the expense of a second line. I program that ring pattern 
into zapata.conf and push those calls directly to Zap/4 (my fax) and 
other calls to Zap/3 (my house), etc....


dbc.