What use is an F-call?

Digital Voice in Amateur Radio is broken. It's a big call for a mere F-call to make, so let me back that up with some facts.

There are three basic digital voice products you can buy as an amateur today, D-Star made by ICOM, System Fusion made by Yaesu and MOTOTRBO or TRBO by Motorola. There is also Project 25, or P25.

Each of these systems are based around technologies and patents owned by a company called Digital Voice Systems Inc. or DVSI.

In essence, each of these systems use the same maths to encode and decode an audio signal. This process of encoding and decoding is embodied in a thing called a Coder / Decoder or CODEC. While each of these use the same maths, owned by the same company, they don't actually inter-operate.

What that means that if you want to use a D-Star repeater, you need a D-Star radio, and if you want to use a System Fusion repeater, you need a System Fusion radio, even though both radios use the same maths to make your voice into a digital signal.

It gets worse.

If Elecraft wants to build a radio that talks to three systems for example, they would need to license the same technology three times, at exhorbitant cost. Most of these are actually achieved by buying a chip from DVSI, not to make it faster, but to protect their maths against people reverse engineering it.

It also means that if you want to experiment with Software Defined Radio, you cannot use it to decode D-Star, System Fusion or TRBO, because the costs to license the technoogy is not viable for anyone other than commercial users.

In January 2014 I was lucky enough to attend the Linux Conference Australia which at the time was being held in Perth, 15 km from my QTH. Being a comper nerd and becoming a radio nerd meant that this was an opportunity too good to miss. You may have heard some of the 50 interviews I did at that conference.

One of the reasons I did those interviews is to begin the process of making my fellow amateurs aware of other ways of doing business. Open Source and Software Freedom are important concepts that relate directly to Amateur Radio.

People like David Rowe VK5DGR and Bruce Perens K6BP are at the forefront of developing and advocating alternatives, like Codec2, a piece of software written by David to address this specific problem.

Amateur Radio is an experimental hobby. What we do is play with stuff, break it, put it together in new and innovative ways, research and develop. None of those things are possible with Closed Source encombered products like the stuff that ICOM, Yaesu and Motorola are flogging.

Yes it's great, it's digital, it improves many things like battery life, bandwidth use and channel separation, but it's also broken. There are 4 and a half D-Star users in VK6, 2 System Fusion users and I'm not aware of any TRBO users. Those numbers are in jest, but this is not widely used technology, despite the fact that digital voice adds many benefits to Amateur Radio.

On the other side of the fence, every Amateur Radio has AM, FM, SSB and CW, precisely because there are no such restrictions.

Next time you buy a shiny new radio, or advocate a new technology, or invite a trojan horse like a free repeater, it would pay to notice the other issues that the sales people gloss over.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB