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Vintage Amateur and Military Radio Amateur/military receivers and transmitters, morse, and any other related vintage comms equipment.

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Old 4th Oct 2020, 10:53 pm   #1
David G4EBT
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Default ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

‘M17’? Huh?:

Don’t know if this has been widely reported or is of any real significance:

https://hackaday.com/2020/10/02/m17-...dio-protocols/

Modes other than AM/SSB/CW never held any interest to me, and most have emerged after I ceased to be active.
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Old 4th Oct 2020, 11:17 pm   #2
SiriusHardware
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

I don't really use my old-school analogue gear enough and when I do things are very quiet, so I can not possibly justify going out and spending money on digital equipment, I never will, now.

What might have helped is for the industry to have adopted a uniform standard but we still seem to have at least two rival systems, Fusion and D-Star, neither of which look likely to win the 'Format War'.

The project pointed to by David seems to be an attempt to establish a uniform standard by way of making it cheap enough and accessible enough to undermine and kill off the proprietary, incompatible formats.

Good luck to it, but I still won't be buying digital gear.

In part, this is due to the way digital has eroded the 'analogue experience' because it seems to have been allowed to mingle with analogue operation on the same frequencies, and this just does not work. If you're scanning the repeater and simplex frequencies with your analogue-only radio and it stops on a horrible wall of digital noise, what do you do? You drop the offending frequency from your scan list or you just turn the radio off and go and do something else.

Either way, the person who calls through the same repeater or on the same simplex frequency ten minutes later using analogue mode isn't likely to be heard or answered by many people.

Given enough forethought, it would have been better to allocate the digital modes, including digital repeaters, their own portion of the band at the same time as we went from 25KHz spacing to 12.5KHz spacing.
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Old 4th Oct 2020, 11:42 pm   #3
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

DSTAR and Fusion aren't 'open' standards. There are aspects of their modulation schemes, data formats and protocols which are controlled via patents by various companies.

As a consequence other companies cannot make systems which will work with them. This has split the whole field. Firms cannot even sell chipsets which would allow home brew radios to operate these standards.

So it's not engineering, the two schemes are strangling each other using commercial and legal means. Neither is catching on enough to make a critical mass.

So what you've found is an attempt to formulate a new standard that no-one actually owns, so anyone and everyone is free to make gear for it.

Major governmental standards setting agencies have been bitten by this issue. The cellphone standard in the US that was officially adopted turned out to be critically reliiant on some techniques which were protected by one company's patents. All other hcip manufacturers had to take out licences from that firm, whatever the price asked. That firm is now very, very rich, phones were overpriced and the government agency got it in the neck as well.

There is dramatically much less money in amateur radio things, but the strangle hold is the same.

David
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Old 5th Oct 2020, 9:05 am   #4
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

I note the M17 protocol draft specification is listed on Google, but has been taken down. A cached copy is available, why shows the PHY layer is 4FSK with the 4 deviation levels at -2.4kHz, -0.8kHz, +0.8kHz, and +2.4kHz. And the signal takes up a channel width of 6.25kHz, and channel spacing of 12.5kHz, so it would appear to be aimed solely at VHF (and up) users. I can't see that spec flying on the HF bands - except perhaps 10m when its functioning like a local VHF band.

I can't see any spec for the audio coding as yet, and I wonder if that will be similarly "open standard"?

As someone who holds an amateur callsign, but rarely uses it these days, I can't see what the attraction is on VHF to produce a sort of "poor man's mobile phone protocol". Sure its an open standard. Will it perform better than standard analog FM? The reason I can't be bothered with VHF operation is that really it holds very few mysteries these days - most of the time, propagation can be readily predicted by suitable modelling of the path, and if I just want to keep in touch with local friends, a mobile phone is vastly easier. There used to be days when I kept a 2m rig permanently on standby on a "private" channel - but it got superseded by phone calls when I was less frequently in the room where the rig was, so I missed calls. A mobile phone works so much better.......


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Old 5th Oct 2020, 9:07 am   #5
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

Actually, just found a pukka copy of the M17 protocol if anyone wants it: https://m17-protocol-specification.r....io/en/latest/

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Old 5th Oct 2020, 9:37 am   #6
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

Quote:
Originally Posted by David G4EBT View Post
‘M17’? Huh?:

Don’t know if this has been widely reported or is of any real significance:

https://hackaday.com/2020/10/02/m17-...dio-protocols/

Modes other than AM/SSB/CW never held any interest to me, and most have emerged after I ceased to be active.
Hi David,

I've just learned the hard way how difficult it is to keep up with the technology of the hobby, especially when you get into your 70s! I've been involved with vintage ham and military gear since the late 90s but prior to that I really got into the Packet scene and the early soundcard modes like PSK31. I also did AMTOR with a Pakratt PK232, which was great fun.

I heard that amateurs were coming back to the hobby in droves during the lockdown and thought I would get on the bandwagon and try the new-fangled modes like FT8, etc., so back in May I bought a new rig, the first for nearly 25 years and all the supporting software and hardware for remote control, as I felt it would be good to have a terminal indoors on the house PC for the winter months, whilst the new "station in a box" rig stayed outside in the shack.

On the face of it, setting it up should have been a walk in the park but I was unable to get the maker's software to do what was a simple server to client application over an Ethernet link. I tried another program, another £40, only to find that wasn't a lot better. So, at present the new radio is just doing what my 25 year old rig did, SSB, CW and a bit of AM!

I have found people very helpful on the various forums relating to my new kit, sometimes too helpful in fact, as they assume a level of knowledge I just don't have! I've also spent a lot of time on YouTube "how-to" videos, which often are contraindicative and confuse me even more!

I am now looking at a "MFJ-1234 radio station server" which is a Raspberry Pi Linux mini-computer in a box with radio hardware but browsing the forum makes my brain hurt, as a Monty Python character used to say! I'm now taking a break from digimodes and may well not return!

73

Roger/G3VKM
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Old 5th Oct 2020, 1:49 pm   #7
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

It isn't so much the rate at which new technologies emerge, it's the speed with which they get dropped!

Getting the box home and opened before it goes out of support is an achievement.

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Old 5th Oct 2020, 6:46 pm   #8
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

If you can't build hardware ONLY to listen to it then it isn't Ham Radio.
Call it what you like but not that.
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Old 7th Oct 2020, 11:14 pm   #9
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

This reminds me of the 'new standard' joke..


Ten digital modes competing for top spot...
"We need a new single universal digital mode"
Result... Eleven digital modes competing for top spot...

Or something like that....


Mark
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Old 8th Oct 2020, 12:31 am   #10
SiriusHardware
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

So true.

I suppose the rationale behind an open source format is that it will be cheaper and undermine the existing formats and eventually kill them off.

But, if you have already bought a D-Star or Fusion equipped radio for let's say £300+, are you going to essentially throw that away and adopt something which isn't made by 'big' brands like Yaesu and Icom? No, what you're going to continue to hope is that your chosen format will win and the others will lose. You'll keep on using whatever you chose until the bitter end, when it becomes impossible to continue because nobody else is still using it.

This is why there needed to be an agreed cross-manufacturer standard up-front before even a single digital amateur radio made it to market. Too late now.
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Old 8th Oct 2020, 8:35 am   #11
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

Quote:
Originally Posted by SiriusHardware View Post
Too late now.
Too right!

At least the Betamax/VHS wars did come to a conclusion, even if the wrong one and poor old V2000 got forgotten.

The digital amateur radio thing, though, does show that there is an even worse outcome, where everyone loses.

International standards bodies are starting to wise-up about the inevitable outcome if they set a standard that locks in something that someone else controls the patents of. Proprietary standards have to be avoided. The entire American cellphone system fell into this trap, to a company run by a radio amateur......

David
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Old 8th Oct 2020, 9:11 am   #12
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

Quote:
Originally Posted by bigfathairyvika View Post
This reminds me of the 'new standard' joke..


Ten digital modes competing for top spot...
"We need a new single universal digital mode"
Result... Eleven digital modes competing for top spot...

Or something like that....


Mark
And another one that has stuck with me...

'The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.....'
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Old 8th Oct 2020, 10:01 am   #13
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Default Re: ‘Replacing Ham Radio Protocols’?

Quote:
DSTAR and Fusion aren't 'open' standards.
I would say they are open, by the definition of "open" as meaning "published".

As far as I am aware, all the common digital voice modes are open standards but use patented codecs. I am not sure this is much of an obstacle to building your own as the codec presumably comes as a chip that you can just buy. I am sure that anyone building their own system would build it from many patented parts, like the transistors ICs etc. not usually seen as a problem?

The trouble with codecs seems to be that there is big money attached. When the first ones patent expires everyone has moved on to a more recent one because the old one was not very good by comparison. I think DSTAR may be in that situation now.

Radio amateurs like cheap gear so making use of old commercial systems is a popular sport, hence the success of DMR. I cannot help but notice that the amateur radio community has managed to produce giant networks of digital voice systems whereby several different system types have been interconnected. These networks have even been known to work on occasions.

I suspect that the real problem is that these modern systems are so complex that most people could not conceive of building one from the ground up.
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