Echolink Made Easier? 

It occurred to me that maybe the author of Echolink, Johnathan Taylor, K1RFD should consider releasing  new version.

Most hams always forget about the port forwarding stuff, which results in no audio... "Connected W1ABC"  (no audio due to lack of setup port forwarding, so they get disgusted with no answer, and shortly their after you hear) "Disconnected W1ABC"

A new version with UPnP support, would help cure this problem and, make things a lot more user friendly.  

UPnP stands for Universal Plug & Play.  Most routers support it by default.    It allows "on the fly" port forwarding set up by the program you are trying to run.  Obviously the program has to have that coded into it, which presently EchoLink doesn't.

I think this would fix this whole mess:

http://www.echolink.org/firewall_solutions.htm