Comment Re:Good reason to avoid proprietary ham software (Score 2) 177
I was just trying to say exactly that, but Slashdot lost my edited comment when I changed an option. Argh.
I never said all hams should build their own radios. But all hams should be able to learn how their radios work, if they are so inclined, and to modify and experiment with them. That's what the hobby is supposed to be about. It's exactly the same philosophy behind the open source software movement, only we hams had it first.
Most ham manufacturers still make hardware schematics available for their equipment, but microcontroller firmware has always been a sore point, especially with more and more functionality moving into DSP (as it should).
Yes, I am working on open source DSP software for the Raspberry Pi (or any other Linux platform) and inexpensive software-defined radio (SDR) front ends like the Funcube Dongle and the SDRPlay. (All three products come from the UK. Not sure what that means, but I'm glad they're making them.)
But my biggest beef is with ham digital voice. There are not one, not two but THREE mutually incompatible digital voice "standards" in common use on the VHF/UHF bands here in soCal: Fusion (Yaesu), D-Star (Icom) and DMR (Motorola). All three modulation and coding designs are dated and inefficient, with disappointing performance. Worse, they all use the same proprietary digital voice codec (AMBE) that's patented out the wazoo. It must be purchased on a custom DSP when it could easily be implemented in software on the same DSPs that do everything else in the radio. This is despite the ready availability of a superior, un-encumbered ham-developed algorithm called CODEC2 (by Dave Rowe, VK5DGR). The manufacturers simply ignore it, and few of us hams are in the position to mass-market small hand-held radios.