Podcasts about codec2

Join me for the Lunchtime Livestream as I welcome Bob, W2CYK, back onto the show to talk about updates to the RFinder platform and how the M17 mode additions are coming along. M17 is the newest digital mode in Ham Radio which uses CODEC2 and is completely open source. Join us to learn about these exciting updates! @M17ProjectLinks from today:Dead or Alive Trade-in - http://hr2.li/fo8zdNEW Ham Radio 2.0 HATS! - https://grapevineamateurradio.com/collections/hats-and-caps

Replay of my livestream where I welcome Ed and Steve back onto the channel to talk about the latest updates and plans for the @M17 Project - M17 is one of the newest digital voice modes in Ham Radio and is fully open-source.

Foundations of Amateur Radio A regular lament is the lack of things to do in our hobby. I know, it's foreign to me, but there are plenty of amateurs who express frustration at the lack of activity, no contacts, nothing new, no challenges. For my poison, I started the process of contacting 100 different countries using 5 Watts. I've been at it for a number of years and truth be told, since my latest domestic move, over two years ago now, my efforts have been put on hold. Not because I didn't want to, but because I was getting annoyed with having to leave my home and wanting desperately to have a functional shack at home. As you might know, that's a project that's still in hand and thanks to some magnificent assistance from various places, I'm still making progress. That said, your perspective might be dulled by the notion that this pretty much concludes the on-air activity possibilities that exist. Within my own license class, until recently, I was permitted to use voice modes like SSB, AM and FM and I was permitted to use hand-keyed Morse. I have access to 10 Watts and am currently allowed to use six different amateur bands, namely 80m, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. So together with the four modes, I'd be able to make 24 different contacts to 100 different countries, that's 2400 different combinations. Of course there are more than 100 countries, that is, DXCC entities. The 2018 list has 340 of them, so that's over 8-thousand different options for getting on air and making noise. Last year all that changed. The local regulator in Australia, the ACMA decreed that all amateurs in Australia were permitted to use all modes. It's taken a little while for that to sink in. Specifically what it means for me. A quick search reveals that there are at least 60 different digital modes, think RTTY, Olivia, PSK31, etc. In addition to those, there's a plethora of other modes like IRLP, AllStar Link, EchoLink, CODEC2 and Brandmeister. So conservatively I'm going to estimate that I now have got access to over a hundred different modes, across six bands with 340 countries, that's over 200-thousand different options for making a contact. Of course it's unlikely that I'll make a contact between say Belize V3A and Perth VK6 on 2m using Olivia, but even if we limit our calculation to HF, we still have at least 136-thousand opportunities for adding something interesting to your logbook. I've been hunting for a canonical list of all the various amateur modes and the tools needed to make and receive them. No doubt that will take me some time. I'll be documenting it on the projects page on vk6flab.com if you want to follow along. Speaking of which, you'll also find past episodes of this podcast there. I suppose I should start by converting my current efforts into some pretty pictures that show what I've been up to so far, but that's a mapping exercise that I'll have to add to my to-do list, since I'm guessing it involves learning how to use some fun mapping tools. If 136-thousand opportunities isn't enough, you can also add grid-squares, large and small, different prefectures in Japan, provinces in the Netherlands, CQ zones across the world or ITU areas, prefixes and operating modes. Clearly there's plenty to do and see. I wonder if there's an award for all modes all bands all countries and I wonder what happens if someone invents a new mode? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio During the week I received an email from a fellow amateur who described that they were feeling deeply disturbed by the decline of the core knowledge underlying the education and certification of today's new amateurs. This is a topic I've covered previously and some of what I'm about to say will touch on things I've said before. I come from a long background in information technology. My first introduction was around the Motorola 6502 processor in the early 1980's. At that time a computer with 5 kilobytes of memory was a big deal. I learnt to harness every byte and nurture every bit. I learnt machine-code, BASIC, Pascal and Modula-2, which went on to form the basis of my current profession. The reason I raise this is because there are many parallels in the evolution of amateur radio and the evolution of information technology. For many years I lamented the dumbing down of the skill-set associated with newly fledged computer graduates. In a nut-shell, hand-coded would always beat Java. I held that view for a long time, until it occurred to me that in the big picture it didn't matter. Let me elaborate before you start jumping up and down. In computing, every two or so years, everything doubles, speed, memory, bandwidth, etc. The price pretty-much stays the same. This means that the inefficiencies introduced by "high-level" languages like Java result in very little in the way of performance loss, but in return the actual process of writing new software accelerates. This means that you end up with more functionality, quicker, at the cost of less efficient code. That's a pretty reasonable trade-off. If that example doesn't speak to you, it's the difference between rolling out turf from the back of a truck to construct a new golf course and teeing off in days, compared to spending a week planting grass, from seed, nurturing it and waiting at least two months until you might consider playing a round. Does a golfer care if was rolled turf or planted seed? A similar thing is happening in our hobby. The advent of Software Defined Radio creates a new category of experimentation. The component count is reduced by several orders of magnitude, in return for functionality built by way of software and maths. Of course that means that the new amateur of today has no idea in the operation of a valve and only limited understanding of a transistor, but in return they can create new modes such as WSPR, JT65, CODEC2 and the massive evolution of other digital experiments, and they can do that with tools unheard of 5 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. I am an example of an amateur who knows of the existence of a valve and I have a rudimentary understanding of how it works. I am seriously considering building my own Software Defined Radio, from scratch. I understand that this might not be something that comes easy and may even be seen as detrimental to the hobby, but I dare say that the introduction of the valve to a spark-gap operator caused the same experience, let alone the introduction of the transistor, the integrated circuit or the explosion of cheap single on chip systems that can be had for cents in the dollar. The essentials still remain. For example, right now I'm working on an antenna. It involves sourcing nuts that seem to be made from unobtainium, even though they are completely standard in our community and have been for longer than I've been alive. The self-learning of our hobby, the exploration, the investigation, the curiosity will endure. What we're going to be playing with tomorrow is not going to be anything like what we were doing yesterday, and I'm OK with that. That our hobby is changing is unmistakable. That's true for every human endeavour ever. I don't agree that there is a decline, nor do I think we've lost more than we've gained. I think the future of our hobby, our community and our pursuits is strong and bright. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio With the growing availability of new ways of communicating across the globe, from digital voice such as CODEC2, through weak signal modes like WSPR, JT65, MSK144 and FT4 to name a few, with Internet linked radio such as Brandmeister and DMR and the newly granted access to all Australian amateurs to all those modes, it's easy to overlook the one mode that started this adventure. Morse Code. It's no longer required to obtain your amateur license, so if that was putting you off from getting your license, you can breathe easy and get right to it. Among all the shiny new modes Morse Code continues to hold its own and for good reason. It's simple, reliable, has an amazing signal to noise ratio and if you're driving in your car and you're stuck without a Morse Key, you can always just whistle into your radio. If you've been following my journey through the hobby you'll know that I've been attempting to learn Morse Code. For a while now. It's been a challenge, more so since I spend less and less time in a car and more and more time behind my keyboard appeasing my clients. That's not to say that I've forgotten, just that what I've tried so far has eluded success. A little while ago I received an email from a friend, Shaun VK6BEK who let me know that there was a discussion happening on a mailing list he was a member of and in that discussion I cracked a mention. Being the shy and retiring type I had to have a look for myself. To read the message I had to join, which is fine, since Charles NK8O has been bugging me to do that for years, well perhaps not bugging, perhaps keying me - hi hi. Turns out that the Straight Key Century Club, the SKCC, was having a recurring discussion about the topic of Head Copy or Head Reading. To give you a sense of what that is, consider what I'm saying to you right now. It doesn't matter if you're reading this in an eBook on your Kindle, reading it on an email or online, listening to it on your local repeater, or via your favourite podcast player, for each of those the same process is happening. You are not absorbing individual letters or sounds, but getting the meaning from the entire structure of a sentence. For uncommon words you might need to calibrate your brain, but for the most part you're just bobbing along understanding what I'm saying. In essence you're doing the equivalent of Head Copy. In Morse Code the same can be achieved. Ultimately it's a language, a tonal one, but a language none the less. Hearing the individual dits and dahs, followed by letters, words and sentences, eventually you'll get to a point where it all just flows. I speak a few different languages, a curse or a blessing depending on your point of view. It means that I've become exposed to how language is built up. Initially when you hear a new language your brain is trying hard to figure out where the individual sounds belong, which sound belongs to which word, how a word begins and ends, how you make a plural, all the things you take for granted after you've learnt a language. In Morse that is no different. Within that context of discussing Head Copy, Gwen NG3P mentioned that she used the text edition of this podcast to convert into a Morse Code MP3 file so she could learn to hear Morse and bring them with her on her mobile phone. Gwen and I had similar aims. In the past I'd done the same with a book, Huckleberry Finn if I recall, as well as random letters and also the ARRL Morse practice downloads, but nothing seemed to work for me. For Gwen my podcast was an obvious source, so much so that I completely missed it, since they are short and on the topic of amateur radio. The language in use is likely going to be things that you'll hear on air and there's a smattering of callsigns, so all good. Long story short, I spent last week converting all 454 episodes of the podcast to Morse Code for your Head Copy practice enjoyment. They're encoded at 25 WPM, or Words Per Minute and the tone is 600 Hz. I even put them online and made it possible for you to add them to your podcast player. Best part? I now get to hear Morse Code at a pace that I'm looking for, on a topic that's relevant and I have been receiving plenty of emails from others who are just as excited as I am. You can find these episodes on the podcast homepage at http://vk6flab.com. Let me know how you go. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Welcome to Episode 242 of Linux in the Ham Shack! In this episode, we bring back a guest to the show we haven't talked with in almost five years. His name is David Rowe, VK5DGR. He is the creator of the open source sound codec known as Codec2. He is also co-creator and maintainer of [...]

Foundations of Amateur Radio The topic of how radio evolves and embraces available technology is one that describes the hobby itself. From spark-gap through AM, SSB and FM our community picked up or invented solutions to make communication possible. When the internet came along it too became a tool ripe for picking and in 1997 a connection between a radio and the internet was made with the Internet Radio Linking Project or IRLP when Dave VE7LTD, a student at the University of British Columbia, joined the UBC Amateur Radio Society. Using a radio, some hardware and a computer, you could send audio between radios across the internet. Since then this field has exploded with D-STAR, Echolink, DMR, AllStar, Wires, CODEC2, System Fusion and Brandmeister. At a glance they're all the same thing, radio + internet = joy. Looking closer there are two distinct kinds of internet radio contraptions, those where the radio is digital and those where it's not. IRLP is an example of an analogue radio connecting to hardware that does the encoding into digital and transmission across the internet. At the other end the reverse process, decoding, happens and another analogue radio is used to hear the result. This encoding and decoding is done by a piece of software called a CODEC. If we continue for a moment down the analogue path, Echolink, AllStar and Wires do similar things. In 2002 Echolink made its way onto the scene, similar to IRLP, but it didn't need any specialised hardware, any computer running the Echolink software could be used as both a client and a server, that is, you could use it to listen to Echolink, or you could use it to connect a radio to another Echolink computer. AllStar, which started life in 2008 went a step further by making the linking completely separate. It uses the metaphor of a telephone exchange to connect nodes together, which is not surprising if you know that it's built on top of the open source telephone switching software Asterisk. In 2012 or so, Yaesu introduced Wires which is much like Echolink and AllStar. There are servers with rooms, not unlike chat rooms, where you connect a node to and in turn your radio. Blurring the lines between these technologies happened when you could build a computer that spoke both IRLP and Echolink at the same time. Now you can also add AllStar to that mix. Essentially these systems do similar things. They manage switching differently, handle DTMF differently, use a different audio CODEC and handle authentication in a variety of ways, but essentially they're ways of connecting normal hand-held radios, generally FM, to each other via the internet using intermediary computers called nodes. Before you start sending angry letters, I know, there's more to it, but I've got more to tell. While Dave was busy in Canada inventing IRLP back in the late 1990's, in Japan the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications funded research, administered by the Japan Amateur Radio League into the digitisation of amateur radio. In 2001 that research resulted in what we know today as D-STAR. Two years later, ICOM started developing D-STAR hardware which resulted in actual physical radios less than a year later. Today you can get D-STAR hardware from ICOM, Kenwood and FlexRadio Systems. Unlike the other technologies where the audio was converted at a central place, in D-STAR the audio is encoded in the radio and a digital signal is sent across the airwaves. That in turn means that the software that does the encoding, the CODEC, needs to be inside the radio. Since the information is digital right from the point of transmit, you can send other information, like GPS locations and messages along with the audio. In 2005 DMR started life as a group of companies, now up to around 40, agreeing on some standards for digital audio in much the same way as D-STAR. Mostly in use by commercial users, DMR has the ability to have two users simultaneously on-air using alternate channels by having separate time slots for each channel, alternating between the two of them. They agreed to use the same CODEC to ensure compatibility. Formal interoperability testing has been happening since 2010, but because DMR allows manufacturers to build in extra features many brands cannot actually work together on the same network. For many years D-STAR and DMR-MARC, the DMR Motorola Amateur Radio Club World Wide Network, were the main digital radio systems around in amateur radio. That changed in 2013 when Yaesu introduced System Fusion. It too made digital audio at the radio, but it added a wrinkle by making it possible to have both analogue and digital audio on the same repeater. Depending on how the repeater is configured, analogue and digital radios can coexist and communicate with each other. The Wires system that Yaesu rolled out was upgraded in 2016, renamed to Wires X and now also incorporates digital information to allow the linking of their System Fusion repeaters. In 2014 at the Ham Radio Exhibition in Friedrichshafen in Germany, Artem R3ABM planned to make an alternative master server for DMR+ and DMR-MARC and the result was a German wordplay which we know today as Brandmeister. It acts as a network for digital radios in much the same way as DMR, but it's run as an open alternative to the commercially available options made by Motorola and Hytera. The story isn't complete without mentioning one other development, CODEC2. It started in 2008 when Bruce Perens K6BP contacted Jean-Marc Valin, famous for the SPEEX audio compressor and David Rowe VK5DGR about the proprietary and patented nature of low data use voice encoders such as those in use in D-STAR, DMR and System Fusion. David had already been working in this area a decade earlier and started writing code. In 2012 during Linux Conference Australia, Jean-Marc and David spent some time together hacking and managed to make a 25% improvement and CODEC2 was well under way. Today CODEC2 forms the basis of several projects including FreeDV in software, the SM1000 FreeDV adaptor in hardware and the roadmap for the future of open and free digital voice is bright. I should mention that this information is specifically brief to give you an overview of the landscape and hopefully I've not made too many glaring errors, but feel free to drop me a line if you do find a problem. Digital radio and the internet, it's not just a single mode, a whole cloud of modes, and I haven't even started with WSPR, FT8 or JT65. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

Foundations of Amateur Radio What is amateur radio? What's not part of the hobby and what is? The more you dig into this, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I'll start with an analogy to set the scene. In aviation, Sir George Cayley was the first person to investigate heavier-than-air flying vehicles. He invented the aeroplane in 1799. The first full-sized glider, built in 1849 carried the first person in history to fly, the ten-year-old son of one of his servants. Since then the Wright brothers made their flight at Kitty Hawk. We saw the invention of commercial aviation, the turbo prop, the jet engine, the space-shuttle, helicopters, drones, rockets, hot-air balloons, the Hindenburg, the Goodyear blimps, hang-gliders, gyro-copters and many, many other contraptions. Each of those are considered aviation and the person controlling the device is considered a pilot. In amateur radio we talk on the radio. We also create repeaters and talk on them. We link them together using what ever technology is available. We make it possible to connect to such networks using software such as Echolink, AllStar Link, IRLP and other internet based systems. We create digital networks with DMR, use WSPR to exchange information, make contacts using CODEC2, have contests using CW and Morse code. We build software defined radios where we use computers to decode and encode radio signals, test back scatter using all manner of signal processing, use packet radio, RTTY, Hellschreiber and bounce signals off the moon and nearby meteors or an overflying aircraft. We make auto-tuners with a Raspberry-Pi or an SWR meter with an Ardiuno. We build valve based amplifiers and program mp3 voice-keyers, GPS lock radios, map propagation using the internet and have a rag chew on the local 2m repeater. We investigate 13cm propagation, do experiments with amateur television and we set up radio stations on top of mountains, in light houses and on remote islands. All of this is amateur radio, and frankly I've only just scratched the surface. There are heated discussions about if a linked repeater using the internet to create the link is real amateur radio or not, whether using your mobile phone as a node on the Echolink network is real amateur radio or not, if using a computer to create contacts on a digital mode such as JT65 is real radio or not. Each of these questions highlights a misconception about our hobby. There are no boundaries in amateur radio. We're a bunch of inventors, mavericks, people who attempt the unthinkable, try the impossible and make progress. There are people who are passengers on planes, and there are people who fly them. There are people using technology and there are people who invent it. We have a unique perspective as a community. We have the ability to imagine something that doesn't yet exist. Why would you spend any energy on whether that thing is real amateur radio or not? Amateur radio is a myriad of things, some of them related to antennas and radio spectrum, some not. This hobby is what you make of it, so go forth and invent something, try something, get on air and make some noise! I'm Onno VK6FLAB

What use is an F-call? Recently I spoke about digital voice communications. I made mention of the CODEC2 project being developed by Dave Rowe, VK5DGR. I also made reference of the kinds of things that digital voice improves, battery life, channel separation and bandwidth. One of the things I didn't mention, mainly because I still had to learn what it meant, is that CODEC2 has an estimated 13dB gain over Analogue FM. To explain what that actually means, you might recall that an S-point is 6dB, that means that if you use CODEC2, you gain more than two S-points, that's a little like turning up the transmitter power from 10 Watts to 200 Watts. If you look at it another way, if you have a Yagi and you install the same Yagi next to it, and connect it up properly, you've doubled the power and gained 3dB. If you do that again, you have 4 antennas and 6dB, if you do it again, you have 8 antennas and 9dB, again, 16 antennas or 12dB gain. So, the performance that we're talking about is something that you can either visualise as turning up the power from 10 Watts to 200 Watts, or using an antenna array with 16 antennas. So what is this magic thing called CODEC2? Well, as I said previously, a CODEC is a piece of software that encodes and decodes stuff. An example that you might be more familiar with is an MP3 file. You open your sound file, and save it as an MP3. The new file is much smaller but it retains most of the fidelity of the original when you play it back. The same is true for other things in use. Your mobile phone uses a GSM CODEC to make your voice travel across the airwaves as bits, rather than raw audio, like the old analogue phones we used to have. The aim of all of this is to reduce data use, to increase availability of channels and to deal with error correction. CODEC2 does all that, for us, here, in Amateur Radio Land, and of course, it can also be used in the rest of the world, for example for mobile phone communications, making it possible to use less power to transmit the same signal and thus use less battery, making your phone last longer. I'm looking forward to a CODEC2 mode on my radio to go with the AM, FM and SSB modes already there. I'm Onno VK6FLAB

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

How about that: It's the first episode of Linux in the Ham Shack for 2015! We hope everyone is having a great new year so far. In this episode, we talk with David Rowe, VK5DGR, of Adelaide, South Australia. David is an audio engineer, Ph.D. scholar, inventor of Codec2 and co-author of FreeDV, among his [...]

  Bruce Perens, K6BP, is a self described evangelist for amatuer radio. As the creator of the Open Source Definition used for the free exchange of software code, Bruce has appled this to amateur radio towards the development of Codec2 and FreeDV, digital modulation schemes for HF and VHF.  Through his new company, Algoram, Bruce hopes to create the ultimate open source handheld software defined radio.  As an evangelist, Bruce founded No Code International, where he successfully eliminated the Morse code requirement for amateur radio licenses Worldwide.

Please join us for a special episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In Episode #085, the hosts interview a vibrant and brilliant engineer from Adelaide, South Australia, named David …