I believe that we should follow the route that Ed is suggesting, even as
it sticks in my craw.
We can buy a dongle for less than $125 depending on who you get it from
and with how much support, etc. that will do the AMBE encoding and
decoding. We can have open source D-Star but talk to this dongle and
much more. I think we hold our nose and realize we are going to be
interoperable with P25 services of first responders and paying much less
than would otherwise be required to get D-Star. I am an idealist, or
otherwise I would not have given away five years of effort to Flex and
this community for NOT ONE SINGLE RED CENT outside of those things my
employer wants me to do. Yet for the greater good, I believe in this
case, we should compromise. When and if a new standard becomes
available, and we can get it done open source GPL, we drop it in.
Bob
N4HY
Woodrick, Ed wrote:
Sure, we'd all like everything to always be free.
But that's not reality.
DVSI has invested millions of dollars into the development of a state-of-the-art solution with AMBE. It is the successor to the IMBE chip that is used in the P25 protocol. It provides compression that is well beyond that of the open source solutions that exist today. And, even more appropriately, it fits in a handheld radio.
But, if the Flex community doesn't want to do something that is currently being
done with other VHF/UHF radios, then that is definitely their prerogative.
Ed WA4YIH
-----Original Message-----
From: flexradio-boun...@flex-radio.biz
[mailto:flexradio-boun...@flex-radio.biz] On Behalf Of Bill Tracey
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 11:27 PM
To: flexradio@flex-radio.biz
Subject: Re: [Flexradio] vhf/uhf digital modes and repeater operation
One could certainly do it, but is it not the start of the path to
madness? Imagine if you needed a dongle for PSK31, one for RTTY,
one for WSJT etc.
Personally I'd rather to see the SDR community advance the Free (as
in freedom) state of the art than support solutions that are
implemented in hardware solely to protect a proprietary codec.
Just one ham's opinion.
Cheers,
Bill (kd5tfd)
At 07:55 PM 6/1/2009, Woodrick, Ed wrote:
But it doesn't preclude the use of D-STAR. (and there is D-STAR data
without voice)
There's a number of efforts where the AMBE chip (a lot of
state-of-art technology crammed into a little chip) is being used to
decode and encode D-STAR signals in a manner completely consistent
with the open source license. You just need to pass the digital data
through the AMBE chip. And with the proper receiver modes, I see no
reason why PowerSDR couldn't decode and encode the GMSK signal necessary.
Ed WA4YIH
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