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Comment Resurrecting Technocrat.net (Score 5, Interesting) 2219

Hi,

So, it is tempting to resurrect Technocrat.net now that Slashdot stinks worse than the last two times I shut down technocrat.net .

If you remember, we didn't get very many readers. We didn't get them because not enough people submitted usable articles.

As it happens, we don't just need a better Slashdot. We need a replacement for Groklaw. And I personally would be happier reading something with the absolute minimum of Javascript except perhaps in the submission editor. Maybe I'm old-fashioned.

I know that I can do it technically, and I have the server, and Cloudflare should be able to help me handle the load. But if it is like last time, and my wife observes that I'm talking to the same dozen guys all of the time, it's not going to work.

What do you think?

Comment Re:MOS? (Score 1) 37

You could do this using FRS walkie talkies, as long as they have microphone and earphone connections. Or analog telephones. It's been tested multiple times on ham FM walkie talkies. Anything that carries voice should work. The bandwidth is only 1.25 kHz and I think the low end starts at about 700 Hz.

Comment Re:MOS? (Score 1) 37

There is a video of the codec vs. SSB on the same radio link here. You can also take any radio links you have at hand and run the FreeDV program. This is an evening project to set up without a business case, and at least some companies appreciate people who take the initiative to do this sort of thing.

Comment Re:1200 bits/s, not bauds. (Score 1) 37

Sorry. When I say "1200 Baud", I am in general thinking of the TAPR TNC 2, which was never built for voice but can do it, to a degree, with this codec. It's sort of a Bell 212 modem on half-duplex radio. There were many commercial products based on the TNC 2 design and many hams have them on hand. It's a good demo to put speech through a pair of them, not really practical because the latency is high.

Comment Re:MOS? (Score 1) 37

MOS is only for people who want to pay a lot of money. Of the automated processes, the one available to us isn't validated for less than 4K bps codecs.

It would be a great improvement to MOS if there was an open version of POQLA. But the actual customer base for the codec have never even heard of MOS and thus we aren't volunteering to write that. The folks who want to put it in expensive government support systems yet aren't willing to help with testing don't get our sympathy.

Comment Re:Code2 voice sample @4:50 (Score 1) 37

We avoid some techniques that would make the noise performance worse. The HF version of the codec doesn't vector quantitize, and doesn't do any delta coding between frames. The current FEC is Golay and we are investigating low-density parity codes.

There is a lot yet unheard about the Ratheon codec, regarding its actual noise performance and how well the listener can distinguish different speakers.

Submission + - Three Videos on Codec2 and Open Hardware

Bruce Perens writes: Codec2 is the Open Source ultra-low-bandwidth speech codec capable of encoding voice in 1200 Baud. FreeDV (freedv .org) is an HF (global-range radio) implementation that uses half the bandwidth of SSB, and without the noise. Here are three speeches about where it's going:
  • David Rowe: Embedding Codec2: Open Source speech coding on a low-cost microprocessor, at Linux.conf.au 2014. YouTube, downloadable MP4.
  • Bruce Perens: FreeDV, Codec2, and HT of the Future (how we're building a software-defined walkie-talkie that's smarter than a smartphone), at the TAPR/ARRL Digital Communications Conference 2013. Blip.tv, YouTube
  • Chris Testa on the .Whitebox handheld software-defined radio design that is the RF portion of HT of the Future, which was also shown at the TAPR conference.

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