The Ham Radio two point zero audio podcast rip. Thank you for downloading and
listening to this podcast. So basically what I do is I take all the
audio clips out of my videos and upload them to spreaker and then from there
they're spread out to iTunes and SoundCloud and now Amazon Audible as well. But
I want to welcome you and thank you for joining the audio section of this
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Thank you in seventy three. I hope you enjoy it. And there
we go right there, All right, guys, Good afternoon show twelve o
two in Texas. Appreciate everyone hanging out today stopping by for this live stream
lunchtime live stream Ham Radio two point zero. So thank you for thanks for
joining me today. Make sure I got all my ducks in a row here.
Special shout out to everyone in green text in the chat YouTube channel members.
Appreciate your support of the channel. I see Andy Cowley in there,
k Q four h x Q, Michael KO four, RNT, David W
zero, r hp w B. I'm sorry w A W n a Ham
radio crusader Freddie Mack is in the house and several more of you done there,
so thanks for thanks for joining us today on that. So I don't
know what to do really because my guest has not arrived yet, so I
don't think that, Yeah, everything is where it should be, but my
guest has not arrived yet. So we were going to be talking about the
open Headset Interconnect standard, I think is what it stands for. Oh hi,
yeah, just right there, and this is a standard connection of headsets
for various Ham radios and other things as well. We're gonna talk about that
some today. But since, uh, since I don't have anyone in my
waiting room yet, I wonder if something happened to Mark. But I don't
know. He gave comment the guys in the M seventeen discord yesterday we're commenting
about how he was going to be on the show. He's in the he
is in the M seventeen discord, and he was commenting about how he was
going to be on today, so I know he knew about it. So
I hope, I hope he's okay, hope nothing happened, but yeah,
so I'm gonna let the waiting room. Sit here for a minute, U,
Kyle, I was you read my mind? I was about to say
just exactly that. Yeah, I want you hop in Kyle. We can
talk about All Star I've got some All Star questions anyway. Or I've got
a All Star question that I think you might know the answer to. I
do not know, but yeah, hop In Kyle, let's do that.
Uh you can't. You can't do a successful live stream without something fouling up.
So and today and today it's not my fault. It's usually my fault.
So I don't know. You never can tell. But I appreciate you
guys hanging out with me anyway. So let's see what we've got there.
Uh No, not like the sig M seventeen M seventeen digital voice amateur radio
mode based on Kodak two. Those guys have been on my live stream before
two or three times. Actually, in fact, they tell me that I
my channel was the first live stream they were ever on. So go back
and look for an M seventeen project on several of my past live streams.
So not, although you know I can, I can. I can appreciate
the six hour thing too, So I'm good with that as well. But
yeah, okay, so we're gonna wait for Kyle to hop in real quick.
Freddie, Freddie mcnows is All Stars well, and Freddie, I'd be
interested in your theory on my question. That my one question that I'm gonna
bring up to Kyle. I kind of bet Kyle to know. But it's
a weird one, but we'll see. So special. Shout thank you to
all of you who came up to me at the Huntsville Hamfest last weekend and
we're like, hey, appreciate you being out there. I love watching your
show. Met so great folks at the ham Fest itself on Saturday. Also
met several of you on Friday at the Mansano Poda hang out, so that
was fun as well, and that's that's always a good time. It's always
a good show, you know. We got there Wednesday night. We were
there for it was probably like seven o'clock that night or something like that.
And we were there for all day Thursday, all day Friday, and I
unmuted myself in zoom Kyle. Yeah, I'm sorry, sorry, Okay,
let me make sure that yeah you're in there, okay, cool, But
I was there all day Thursday, and all day Friday we went. We
hung out with the gigaparts guys a little bit on Thursday, and then we
did a PODA thing on Friday like we've done the last couple of years and
it was a fun time. So special, uh special. Shout out to
everybody who who attended that show and came up to me. I appreciate you
guys being out there. Kyle, what's up man? How are you good?
How are you? What's what's happening on it? You got home back
to Texas in one piece? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, we got you
know, I was gonna drive. We left probably about three o'clock Sunday afternoon
something like that, and I'm looking at Mike and we're pulling out and like,
t O's still there. Ack is still there, and there's uh Nayo,
who shared our camp site. He and his girlfriend decide, they were
up in the air about whether they're going to leave. They decided to stay
for the night. And I looked at Mike. I'm like, I kind
of almost wish we were staying. He's like, well, let's turn around
and go back and stay. I'm like no, I mean we were pulling
the camper out of the park, and it was his idea. He wanted
to leave early because he's got a three hour drive home after we get back
to my house, right, So I'm like, okay, yeah, I
get it. But I think next year we might plan to stay because there
were a lot of people that stayed, and if I had known that,
I might have planned to stay as well. But oh well, so I've
got so little news. Usually I get some. I'm having trouble with my
collar here. I gotta look pretty for everyone. So I got a cabin
this year, read some at URF. He wasn't able to to show up,
so sterling and I grabbed his cabin. Usually I bum with somebody in
the the RV site, but I'm getting an RV the first of next year,
so I rented a campsite for next year, and I think I'm gonna
stay over Sunday and then drive home Monday. I think that's gonna be my
my plan. Okay, but do you any idea when you might come in
Thursday? Thursday? Okay, Thursday afternoon to Monday. I think that's the
plan. Okay, Okay, that's that's cool. We're we're actually talking about
coming in a tad bit earlier next year than we did this year because there
was something happening on Wednesday night. Remember what it was now, Well,
it was about a thirteen hour drive including stops for fuel, lunchtime, et
cetera, et cetera. So it was about a thirteen hour drive that split
into two days is just easier on everybody. Yes, So it's not about
you know, I usually kind of limit my I'll do it all in one
day time to about ten to eleven hours. And if you look at Google
Maps, it is ten and a half hours from here to the top of
the mountain. And of course you know you can never do it straight through
because you have to stop for fuel and to pee and for lunch and every
you know, a bunch of other stuff. So well, also, you're
pulling a trailer. I'm sure that the trailer pulls a little different than you
know, you just hopping in your truck and going correct. Yes, yes,
very true. So yeah, and that's doing something you know, I
was doing between sixty five and seventy most of the time. The speed limit
was seventy five, so I wasn't going quite as fast as I could have
been. But yeah, that's all. That's all a factor into it,
so splitting that in the two days is a little bit appealing. We had
talked about getting the Yeah, we talked about getting there, like getting up
doing half of it like Tuesday afternoon evening, driving for five or six hours,
and then doing the rest Wednesday morning. So we might do that next
year. We'll see what. We'll see what the deal is on that.
But yeah, make a couple of changes, especially if t O's up there
trying to win some contest by cheating on it, showing up three days early.
You know, we might. But you know, the one thing I
love about Huntsville is it is so laid back, Like I don't feel guilty
leaving on Saturday afternoon and going to grab a beer. Like you know,
it's just like one of those things where you see everything and you're at the
you're at the pavilion on Friday, you're hanging out with people. It is
a very laid back versus Dayton or dating is very chaotic, Right, You're
just trying to get everything in four days. You're trying to like just see
everyone, see all the vendor boosts, whatnot. Huntsville or Orlando is a
little bit less stressful because you know, we've got the guys that do the
r and we we set back there and you know, drink beer and and
have a good time. But Huntsville is definitely one of those places where you
can easily get through everything and then just relax the whole time. That relax
during the weekend. Right it's not very stressful. Right Right now, everything's
in one room. You're not worried about missing something. Because at Dayton and
at Orlando, I'll walk through all the rooms and then I'll walk back through
one or two the rooms because I'm like, oh, I wanted to go
back and check this thing out that I walked by, but I didn't get
to stop out, and then you'll find something else in that room and like,
oh I didn't see that the first time. Yeah, there's not much
chance of that happening at Huntsville because it's all right there. But you know,
Josh got that k that Elcraft K one, so it's definitely worth walking
through the flea market, I guess. So that was pretty cool. Yeah,
I watched that livestream. I watched your live stream and Josh's live stream
yesterday, and yeah, I'm surprised that it was still there whenever he was
walking through, because he streamed relatively later in the morning on Saturday. I
mean it wasn't. Yes, he streamed the flea market part later. That's
yeah, yeah, so I was surprised that it was still there. Yeah,
yep, I yeah, I agree. So I don't know. I
mean, those are pretty rare, but I'm not sure how much they're saw
it after. So yeah, I'm yeah, somewhere around here. I have
a k X one, but I practiced my ced I've been practicing my CW
every day since we got back. Nice. So I got that Morse tutor
from MFJ, the one that it'll you can you tapped the button and it
does a character or a couple of characters, or maybe we'll do a word.
You can set it up to do different things and then you sit there
and listen to it, and you look down at the screen and see if
you're right. The screens a little weird, kind of hard to see on
it because if you hold it, you got to hold it at a certain
angle or it looks like it's all great out. So it's a little bit
strange scream, but it works well. I was tinkering with it this morning,
getting pretty good at hearing single characters. No good, still it like,
don't care, I'll say that maybe we can get your first CW contact
in September. I think that I got Okay, So I was gonna ask
if you I was gonna ask if you wanted to talk about that. We
can talk about that. I haven't officially announced that. Yeah, I haven't.
Haven't. We don't. We can keep it a secret for for as
long as it doesn't matter. No, no, no, no, I'm
not. I'm not worried about keeping a secret. I want to announce it.
I wanted, Yeah, I want to talk about it. So well,
Freddie Freddie decided to join us also, uh so the he lost my
train of thought. Now, I made a c W contact with someone.
I think it was Adam. He went up on a Soda summit like two
or three weeks ago to that group thing. He did. He was he
was in your stream the other night and I said, Adam, did I
contact you? And he's like, well maybe, I mean he acted like
he didn't know, so well, I don't know, but I sent my
call sign out when he would I got a I got a HAM alert about
him. Actually, I think he posted in discord. It's like, hey,
I'm out on soda doing CW. I think it was. It was
on twenty meters, it was on my seventy seven hundred back here, and
I I was listening to it, and I'm not I'm not. I'm not
sure what I heard. I mean, I heard a call sign, but
I could I couldn't think it out exactly. But I went back to him
with my call sign. I heard my call sign come back to me,
and I just sent. I just sent five five N five N seventy.
Oh well, so I mean it, yeah, it might have it might
have worked. But he I thought he would say something, so I thought
he would write and say, just brush off your first c W contact right
aft whatever. So Freddie got got the camera there, Bud prying too,
Okay, start that virtual camera and nobs right, yeah there it goes all
right. So here, So here's the thing. Here's here's an all Star
question for you guys. And Mark is Mark is in the waiting room.
Oh okay, he's a little late. But now we're gonna bring on Mark.
I'll bring on here in here in just a minute. Mark. So
I'm gonna finish my train of thought here. So during my drive to Huntsville,
I had I have a mobile. I have a mobile Verizon hot Spot
that is going in the truck and I haven't put it in the truck yet
because the last time I try to use it field day, it decided to
not broadcast in SSID for the Wi Fi side of it. The motum itself
works fine, you plug it in Ethernet, great, but the WiFi wouldn't
work, and I don't know why. So that's usually what I'm on when
I'm mobile. Well, I didn't have that this time, so I put
I turned on my hot spot on my phone, which my Sherry nods been.
It has that in the WPA supplicant file has for a long time.
Connected it pulled an IP address, tried to connect to my four three one
three six hub node. No go, connection failed, connection failed, connection
fail all trip. Mike was making fun of me. He's like, dude,
I don't think it's gonna work. Tried to connect to another node and
got not connection failed, but it wouldn't connect it. It was a different
message. I don't remember. I think it was your note, Kyle,
but I'm not sure. I can't remember which one it was. So anyway,
fast forward, we go to Huntsville. I didn't try it while I
was there. I didn't try it. On the way home. I get
an email while I'm driving home that I saw later some other guy. He's
like, hey, man, I know you've had this problem before, but
I can't connect your node to your hub. And the last time that happened,
I had to reboot my hub, and then other people, including my
including my Sherry Note. Well, sure enough, I rebooted my hub yesterday,
Yeah, and my Showy Note, and I try to I tried to
connect from my home plug the Showy Note up yesterday. Ye got an IP
address star three four three month three six connection failed. Reboot my hub.
Oh, there it goes. It's connected. So there is something on my
hub server in the cloud that you and I installed, Kyle. Yeah that
After a few days, it just stops allowing new connections, and it does.
It seems to be kind of selective. It's not all new connections,
because I'll watch Superman and I'll see people drop out and come back in maybe
a maybe an auto connection string, I don't know, but somebody's connecting,
and then it just prevents some of us from connecting sometimes. So, well,
somebody said I should run a crown job into a reboot every few days,
and I'm like, well, I don't think I should have to do
that. I think that's a band aid. So anyway, yeah, right,
that's a yeah, that's a a solution to not getting to the root
of the problem, right, right, correct, So why don't we at
some point, why don't we take a look at the logs and we'll try
and connect and take a look at the logs and var logs and your cislog
and your Asterix log and see what it's doing in the back end. We'll
see like Asterix might be you know, it might be hung up like a
reboot of the system. Yes, might do it, but you might have
to just restart Asterix. I mean, granted, you don't really want to
do that, because then that's not the root of the problem. So let's
take a look at the logs and see what's going on with that. Okay,
Yeah, how often is that happening. It's only happened twice since Kyle
and I installed that, which has probably been what two or three months ago.
Yeah, it's only happened twice that I have noted that it's only happened
twice where it's affected me. I got an email from a guy one time
and he said the same thing, but that was around the same time as
affecting me. So, and you have updated to patched and got the latest
updates on both os and yeah, probably not, okay, probably not,
Probably want to do that. It might be a bug that we're seeing in
some type of you know module that who knows the logs will the logs will
tell us, the logs will set you free, right, okay, all
right, good? Well live stream on this coming Sunday. We're gonna build
some sherry Pie hats that I have. Oh sweet, So you guys are
welcome to join us. I've divvied out three or four those to various people
and should be putting those together and then getting more people to get one.
Uh. Frank Dawn n five Skat gave Frank his sherry node at Huntsville last
weekend. As far as I know, he hadn't booted it up yet.
But Frank does not need one, so hope we'll leave Frank. I think,
I mean Frank's welcome to join us also hit. In fact, he's
on the invite, but I don't think he's gonna need a pie hat.
I think he's got one now that works, okay, yeah, sweet.
So the All Star System, for those of you who have never connected,
is no longer going to be frank free, so just bear that in mind.
At some point in time, we're going to be invaded by the frank.
So bring it on. I've got Mark in the waiting room, so
I'm gonna let him in and we're going to talk about OHI ohis ohis.
However, you say that the acronym ohis the open headset interconnects standard that he
is working on and Hello, Hello, what's up? Mark? Hey,
guys, I'm so sorry for being late. That's all right, we'll deal
with it. Uh, that's cool. Do you want to do you have
a presentation, website, slides, anything going to share? So I do
have some slides that I can do with a screen chair on if you like,
or just do this entirely verbally. No, no, no, you
can share it. That's fine. Uh, Kyle and Freddie, you guys
are welcome to hang out in the background. I'd ask that you moote yourselves
or you can drop if you want to iss your choice. I'm gonna drop
and I'm just gonna hang out in the chat. Okay, I'm gonna do
the same. I got some cables to build. All right, guys,
thank you, thanks for joining. Hey, thanks for covering from you.
Guys. I apologize. Thanks now. Yeah, we got it, Kyle.
We will talk about that other thing later. Sounds good, Thanks man,
Thanks man. All right, So there we good Mark, good,
good afternoon. Why don't you introduce yourself real quick. Hi. My name
is Mark Smith, also known as Smitty Holliban in a lot of contexts.
I am one of the hosts of the Ham Radio Workbench podcast, and a
couple of years ago, I started a company called Halibut Electronics, building Ham
Radio Electronics, and my eventual goal is to get into audio file electronics.
But I haven't actually released any of those products yet. So Ham Radio and
audio file electronic stuff. Good deal, Okay, bringing it up the yeah
there is. I want to make sure I had the right website to bring
up. Okay, cool. Yeah, So the website is electronics dot halibut
dot com. Yeah, yeah, that's the I just googled and found it.
So yeah, that's good. Let's see there it is right there,
So tell us a little bit. So this open open, I'm saying it
right, open headset interconnect standard? Is that right? Perfect? You got
it? Okay, okay, all right, So that is a thing that
I think you emailed us about originally. Yeah, and I mean anytime,
anytime we can standardize connections of things to radios, I think that's a good
thing. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what that is?
Okay? So there's actually another website for OHIS, although that website needs
a lot of work. So the better diagram is probably do you see the
halibut headset interconnect that first link right up at the top or at the top
of the text that one, yes, click that, and then there is
a diagram in there that I'm going to want you to zoom in on that
diagram right there. So this is probably my best summary of OHIS. I
need to go work on the other website. So I'm going to preface this
that there are two different things that not for two things that I'm doing here
today. One is standards advocacy. Right, this is a non commercial I
believe this is something the hobby and the industry needs to do. That is
the standard advocacy part of this, and that's ohis open headset interconnect to standard.
The second thing is a very commercial my business. Oh by the way,
I also happen to sell some of the devices that do this OHIS stuff.
But the standard is an open standard that I am hoping individuals will start
doing on their own as DIY projects or other companies will start adopting and bringing
on their own stuff. So it may seem like I'm I've got some contradictory
things going on here, where one of them is trying to get a bunch
of other people to compete with me, And yes, that is exactly what
I am doing. I am trying to get the industry on board with this
open standard, and so that's going to look like I am trying to get
other people to compete with me. It will also look like I'm doing this
standards advocacy. Oh and by the way, I am selling devices. So
I'm I try to keep these two different hats clear as to which one I
have on at any given time. So right now I'm going to go put
on my standards advocacy hat and talk about the standard itself. Okay, Okay,
So the basic problem is we've got standards for power thirteen point eight volts
DC. Right, we've got standards for our excuse me, fifty own coax.
We may have different physical standards for those electrical standards, but it's easy
to convert back and forth because electrically they're the same. Right. On power,
we've got Anderson power poll. Or you've got that sixpin not quite Molex
connector that is on the back of a lot of HF radios, right,
It's kind of looks like a Molex connector, but Molex doesn't actually sell that
connector. It's weird. Or the you know, the T shaped blade connector
on the back of hanging out of mobile racks. Right, But it's easy
to convert back and forth between those because they're the same electrically. Same with
RF, you've got you know, PL tifty nine connectors or Type end connectors
or BNC or SMA. They're all physical standard difference, but they're the same
electrical standard. We don't have that kind of standard for the interface between the
radio and the user. Right, So if I've got a headset that I
buy, like say a highle Pro seven or a radio sport or a cheap
O PC gaming headset off of eBay or Amazon. Right, I can't plug
that into any radio right now, because none of the radios use those same
connectors. But I can buy an adapter that goes from that particular headset to
that p picular radio, right. But if I try and take that headset
and plug it into a different radio, I need to buy a different adapter.
And if I buy a different headset with a different connector, now I
need a whole another set of adapters, right, And so you end up
with this full mesh of adapters between every possible headset I ever want to plug
into these radios and every possible radio that I may want to plug into.
It's not just one adapter for each it's one adapter for each pairing Is that?
Is that in addition to the fact that Icon uses a different microphone standard,
Because my hile Pro seven, which I actually bought to connect to my
Flex Maestro, which is an r J two forty five jacket, won't connect
to the back of the freaking radio. It's a different plug, yep.
But but it's the same plug as a Yazoo. So I can actually connect
my hile Pro seven that I bought for the Maestro to my FTDX Tan Yazoo
and it works great. But I am told that even if I switched the
plug, the microphone in the that version of Pro seven is different than what
Icon requires, so I can't use it on exactly correct. That that's part
of part of the system that you're combating here, correct, correct, So
you thank you. You you led me directly into the next part, which
is even if I buy the right adapters. By the way, a lot
of radios use the same physical connectors but different pinouts, right, right,
And then even if you've got the right pin out and the right physical connector,
you have this electrical discontinuity that there are dynamic microphones like what Flex uses
and what YESU uses and what Kenwood uses, and then there are electric microphones
like what Icon uses, and you can't take different They've got to be different.
And you can't take a microphone from one and plug it into another.
Right, And that's all just on HF. When you add mobile rigs into
that, then you get into you know, so there's there's no standard,
right. And when I'm at home in my home shack and I've got one
headset, because I've only got one head right, and I've got my known
set of radios. It's not that big of a burden to be able to
buy these adapters. So does it really make sense in a home environment to
do something about this? Not really. But when you go into a multi
user environment, I think like a club shack or a contesting station or an
EOC where I want to walk into this multi user environment with my headset that
has my ear goopers in it, and I don't want you using my headset
and getting your ear goopers into my ear cups. And I don't want to
put your ear goopers into my ears, right, So I want to take
my headset with me and be able to plug it into any radio in this
environment and just have it work right. Our current environment does not lend itself
to that. So what I am proposing is a standard interface between the radio
and the user. And I use the term headset a lot because that's kind
of the easiest to understand, But there's nothing about the standard that says it
actually has to be a headset. It could just be a microphone on a
boom with some you know, proper good earphones and a hand PTT switch.
All of that works as well, But I'm going to continue to just summarize
and call it headsets. That's totally fine. Yeah, I suppose I was
thinking when you said user to radio, I was thinking, well, wait
a minute. C W keys are pretty much standardized. You've either got a
three point five millimeter jack or maybe a quarter inch jack, and they're adapters
are plentiful for that. But I guess if you want to put a headset
on your radio and listen to your I forget the name Kyle's going to kick
me, where you hear your side tone, If you want to listen to
your own side tone, you want to pull that signal out of some noise,
then you have to have a headset to plug in whatever radio from there.
It doesn't necessarily have to be the microphone head set, but it can
be like an external speaker headset like ten both have a three point five millimeter
on the front of it for audio only. You can't use that as a
with a boom on it, but correct so there's there's options there, But
there are options there, and like for each individual problem that we're talking about
here, Honestly, the microphones are the most complex. Headphones are are easy
to convert back that there are two standards of the three point five in the
quarter inch, and it's either stereo or mono, but if you plug one
into the other, it's fine. Mobile rigs don't have headphones output. They
only have speaker outputs, and those speaker outputs are not always ground referenced,
so electrically, if you try and plug a speaker output, even if you
keep a volume really far down, if you plug that speaker output into something
expecting a headphones, you may still blow it out, even if the voltage
level is fine, because both sides are being driven, one of them is
not ground. In headphones, you have ground and then a signal that goes
up and down below, up and above, above and below ground. In
speaker outputs, they are often what is called push pull or balanced, where
you're driving both sides opposite of each other and you can end up delivering four
times as much power with the same voltage. Power supply is the reason you
end up doing that, So it allows you to have a more powerful amplifier
audio amplifier without having to boost voltages up or anything like that. But because
of that, they really can only be plugged into a speaker's They can't be
plugged into anything that's expecting one of those two signals to stay at ground level.
Right. So anyway, the point being that we've got all of this
complexity and if you want to be able to just plug in a headset into
one of these radios, you've got to do a lot of stuff to make
that work. So I am proposing a standard called the Open Headset Interconnect Standard.
It is an open standard, freelike speech. Right to borrow a term
from the open source software community. It is freelike speech. I want this
to be adopted by everybody. There is no licensing limitations on this or any
thing like that. And it open headset interconnects. So again we're talking about
the audio between the radio and the user. And then standard hopefully everybody adopts
it, and then I can plug a headset from one manufacturer into a radio
from another manufacturer and it just works. Right, that's the goal. Ideally
the radio manufacturers and the headset manufacturers would adopt this standard natively, and you
would buy an icon radio that just has an OHIS port on the front or
maybe on the back, and it's just there and it works. Saying with
ken Wood, saying with Gaysu, saying with flex whoever, right, that's
the ideal future. I totally acknowledge that we are a long way away from
that. Right, That's not going to happen anytime soon. And so we
need to get adoption on this standard first. And the way we're going to
do that is by making adapters. Okay, so now you're introducing adapters back
into this play, How is that any better than where we are now?
If I've got to buy adapters to go to OHIS, how is that better
than what we're doing already? And the answer to that is for with a
standard defined in the middle. Now, I buy one adapter from my radio
that is unique to my radio, and you connected to the radio, and
it presents an OHIS port, and that is the last adapter I ever buy
for that radio. It connects to that radio, it is unique to that
radio, and it stays with that radio forever. And then I do the
same thing with my headset. I buy one adapter for my headset that is
unique to that headset, and it stays with that headset forever. And now
my radio has an OHIS port on it, and my headset has an OHIS
port on it, and now I can plug that headset into any radio that
has an OHIS port. I don't have to worry about what kind of radio
is behind it. I don't have to worry about having a full mesh of
all of these different adapters. It's one adapter per device and you're done.
So would I be able to and if I understand what you're saying correctly,
the answer to this is no. I I may have I may own more
than one radio, Okay, more than one manufacturer shot but yeah, yeah,
exactly so uh so, but I have my high Pro seven headset,
which I would love to use on everything. So do I have to buy
do I mean you said it stays with the radio forever? If I have
five radios I use, when I have to buy five interfaces each one free
tradio plus the one for my headset that stays with the headset. Understood that
part, But yep, I would have to change them around between radios.
You, I mean, technically you could do that, But the model assumes
that you buy an adapter for the radio and it stays with that radio,
okay, And and it does all of the conversion between the standard interface and
whatever your radio needs. So if you plug. If you buy one of
these and configure it for a YESSU radio, it'll take whatever the standard level
is for the microphone and convert it to a dynamic level for that radio.
Okay, Right, you buy one for an icon, it'll take whatever the
standard is and convert it to that electric level that the icon is expecting.
Right, So all of the complexity about what different types of signals these radios
use are in those adapters. And then on the OHIS side, it is
a standard interface that everybody uses that exact same electrical and to a lesser degree
physical interface. Okay, I understood. So that is what OHIS is in
a nutshell, well a very large nutshell, I talk a lot, and
so like again, where does the shine. The shines in multi user environments
like the EOC, like a contesting station, like a club shack, that
kind of stuff. But that's not the only place that it works. The
other advantage to having a standard interface between the user and the radio is that
it makes it a hell of a lot easier to build a device that goes
between the radio and the user. Right, that's what I actually want to
do for Hell of It electronics. Then the reason I can justify trying to
get other people to make adapters is that it gets adoption. And what I
really want to do is I want to make these devices that go between the
radio and the user. So let me give you an example of one of
those devices. And this is where I'm going to be blurring the lines between
standards advocacy and commercial products, because I am making this product, but I
am using it as a justification for why you might want this standard in your
shack as well, even in your personal shack. So there is a device
I'm calling the contesting console. It is a single box. It has two
ports for headsets, a left operator and a right operator, and you think
of them as a radio operator and a logger. Is this on your website?
Not yet? Okay, it's it's still in prototype form I am.
I am literally developing prototypes for this thing right now. In fact, I
just sent the next version of the prototype off to fab yesterday. Okay,
So, and I'm I am ninety percent confident that that last prototype, version
one dot two that I just sent off will be the last one I need
to actually the last prototype I need to make before I go to production.
So I'm hoping to be selling these before the end of the year. But
the point is that it's a console that has two headset ports and one radio
port, so it connects two users to that radio. Those users, yes,
those users have an intercom between each other, so they can talk to
each other and say, oh, was that a k M six or a
k N six. Right. They can have those conversations without having to pull
their headphones off to talk to each other. And they can each both hear
the radio, and then whichever user presses their PTT, that user's microphone audio
is sent to the radio. Okay, right, So each user has a
four channel mixer. They have their own independent four channel mixer, and this
is the audio. They can set the level for the audio from the radio
itself their own audio, so they can get a little bit of sidetone.
We were just talking about sidetone, right, So you can send your own
microphone audio up to your headset if you want the other operator's microphone audio.
And then the fourth one is what I'm calling ambient. There's a MEM's microphone
up here if you want to be able to hear what's going on around you,
like if somebody walks up to your table, that you're working at and
they start asking you a question, rather than pulling your headphone off to be
able to talk to them, you can just turn up the ambient mic a
little bit and hear what they're saying to you, all right, without having
to take your headphones off. And so each user has their own four channel
mixers, so they can set their own balance of signals that they are hearing,
right. And then there's also this one which is a speaker power amp.
And so if that person walking by doesn't want to interrupt what you're doing,
but they want to hear the full QUESO, right, they can already
hear you talking because you're speaking right, but they can't necessarily hear the radio.
So instead they turned this volume knob up and connect an external speaker to
this three point five millimeter socket right here, and then that plays the radio
audio. You just talked me into that, and let me tell you why
I was already I was already going to buy one, but since you said
that, okay, we go out and poda a lot, and I'll usually
not always, but usually ninety five percent of the time have a camera ruling,
Well, if I plug in my headset, the camera can't hear the
audio of the radio coming back to me. Yeah, so you just solve
the problem of being able to make a PODA video and use a headset at
the same time. Yeah so in that yeah, yeah, yeah, that
would do that for you. Yeah. But building this device taking off the
commercial hat and putting on the standards advocacy hat. Building this device without that
standard means that I need to make that port that connects to the radio complex
enough so that it can connect to any radio, whether it's a dynamic microphone
or electric microphone, whether it is headphone level, line level, speaker level,
whether that speaker level is balanced, push pull or ground reference to all
of that complexity has to be built into this device. Same with the headsets
on these two ports, right, and with the standard, I don't have
to worry about any of that. That makes this so much easier because I
know exactly what kind of levels and what kind of signals are going to be
coming in on each of those ports. Okay, does it have noise canceling
for the voices in your heads? I'm sorry, James, I don't think
I can. I am not qualified to address the voices in your head.
To be blessed by priest first, So Jeff wanted to know, and I
think you address this already. Does the OHIS adapter provide the bias for the
electric kyle mic? So short answer is yes, okay, curses. I
don't have any within easy reach, so all right, let me let me
switch into commercial mode. I Mark Helibut Electronics is selling two different devices.
I have what I call the Radio Pro. You've got pictures up there perfect.
I have what I call the Radio Pro, which is this box here.
This is the radio side adapter. So it's got all the different kinds
of connectors that you can connect into your radio. It has the GX sixteen,
the eight pin round connector, or an RJ forty five or three point
five millimeter for the microphone. It's got an external PTT because you have a
flex and so you know the joys of having PTC on a separate connector.
Very few radios do that flext. So I've I've created or provided an RCA
there for that, and then a three point five millimeter here for headphones or
speaker output. All right, so you can connect these over to your radio
and then of course power and then on the front it exposes an OHIS port
on there, and so by just doing that, you have converted your radio
into an OHIS. But wait a minute, I still want to be able
to use my stock devices on my radio. I don't want to lose the
ability to use my really nice desk mic from my YESU or whatever it is.
Right, So radio pro also provides pass throughs for all the connectors on
the back. Okay, so you can still connect your desktop radio or your
desktop microphone or whatever it is, the stock microphone for your radio into the
front of this, and if you use that microphone, it is connected through
to your radio all the time until you hit PTT on the OHIS And once
you hit PTT on the OHIS then it switches is the microphone over to the
OHIS headset and then the receive audio from the radio goes to both of them
and all the fun stuff. So this is the radio side adapter. All
the electric all the circuits to convert from whatever the standard is to what your
radio uses are in here. All the pinouts are configured in here, all
of the electrical signals are configured in here. You got trimpots to adjust all
of that, and a couple of jumpers that you can set for whether you
need gain and blah bah blah, bah blah. All of that stuff is
configured in here, and so this should work on literally any radio. That's
why it's the pro model, is that you can configure it for any radio.
Does it does it come with adapters? Or do you have to specify
which radio you're going to put it on when you're ordering, or how does
that work? So bring up the web page again and I'll show this to
you. Short answer is you specify one. Okay. So the one on
the right there the HHI Radio Pro configure board. That is where all the
configuration is done. And it looks ginormous and complex. Don't worry about it.
It is pre configured for most radios, most modern radios. If you
have a weird radio that uses a different pin out or different signal levels,
then you may have to go in in there in a just a few things,
and all of this is documented. It's all very clear. It is
only configured with slaughter blobs. Okay. But when you buy your Radio Pro,
it comes with one config board and you get to select which of I
think four different configurations I have for YSU HF radios, Yasu mobile radios,
which are unfortunately a different config board ICM HF and mobile rigs and Kenwood HF
and mobile rigs, And of course the YU HF works with Flex and the
Kenwood works with Ellacraft as well because Ellacraft chose the Kenwood standard for their connections.
So you get to choose which of the config boards you buy. If
you change radios or make a mistake there, you can reconfigure your existing config
board, or you can buy an additional config board. So you are asking,
do I need to buy one adapter for every single radio? OHIS does
not specify that my products specifically, all the configuration for the radio is handled
that on that board. That's only forty bucks. And so you can buy
additional daughter boards, one for each of your radios, and so you can
move the big expensive part from one radio to the next and just swap out
the configuration for the radio on that on that simple board, right, Or
you can buy one adapter for every single radio and give them each their own
unique configuration board. Okay, okay, And then you do have to know
which cables you need, right, whether you buy a g X sixteen cable
or an r J forty five or if you've got a Yasu mobile, the
Yeysu mobiles use the six pin r J a connector. I think it's an
RJ twelve or six P six C And we do make we Halibut Electronics do
make a custom cable that is an RJ forty five on one side and the
RJ twelve the six pin on the other side, with the correct pinouts and
everything. And we make sure that the microphone signal stays on a pair,
which makes it a pain in the butt to make. Yeah, I imagine,
So okay, okay, okay, good. So, so the question
was about the that doesn't provide the bias voltage for the uh hile microphones.
So go back to the to the previous page. Actually it might be a
you might also be interested in at the bottom anyway, look for no click
on the up at the top. Yep. Click on the HHI the Halibut
Headset interconnect link again, yep. There, and then go down to the
user pro. So the User pro that is the headset side of this.
So the User Pro is a small plastic box device and it's got an RJ,
it's got an ohis port on one side. And then three three point
five millimeter sockets on the other side. And again it can also be fully
configured, but you buy it pre configured for different headsets. Inside that box
is a microphone preamp that will take a dynamic microphone and bring it up to
the electric level, which is the standard. So we haven't actually talked about
what the standards are. Electrically speaking, the standard OHIS standard is electric level
standards. So if you if your headset is already an electric microphone, you
can just connect it straight through with no electronics. If your headset is a
dynamic microphone, the standard includes a very simple five component preamp. It's like
one transistor, three resistors and one capacitor. You know, it costs pennies
to make and that will take a dynamic microphone, allow and allow you to
connect it to a device expecting an electric microphone. So it does the amplification
and it uses the bias our coming from the device that you're plugging the microphone
into. So for five components you can turn a dynamic microphone into an electric
microphone. That is part of the standard. It is available as part of
the standard, mean you don't have to use it if you've got a better
mic preempty to rather use. You're welcome to. But it's available free for
use for anybody who wants to do that. So I would probably want to
get one for Icom yep, because my Hio pro seven is made for Yezu
slash Flex and I can plug it in natively, and then I could take
that same headset with this User Pro and plug it into an OHIS poured on
an icon that I set up. Correct. So the way you would do
this is you would buy User Pro preconfigured it. Again, you'll let us
let the User Pro has the choose option down there. What preconfiguration do you
want? You would buy one for the Icom Dynamic I'm sorry, Hile dynamic.
Hio Yeah, Hi, Hile dynamic. So that matches the element that
you have in your microphone, even though your icon is expecting an electorate that
is handled on the radio pro side. Got you right? On this side,
you are adapting whatever your headset has to the standard. Okay, So
you would buy a high dynamic User Pro excuse me, and then you'd be
OHIS standard in the middle, and then you would buy a Icom Radio Pro
and that would convert from whatever the standard is to what the icon is using
right understood, Okay, perfect, So that's that taking off the standards advocacy
hat and putting on the commercial hat again. Uh. These adapters, the
Radio Pro and the User Pro are available for pre order right now. If
you go to electronics doto dot com, they are pre order right there.
We have all the parts except for one. That one is the plastic case
for those User pros. Uh. They are supposed to be delivered in September,
and then I've got a bunch of milling that I need to do to
them and then send them up to the manufacturing company. And we should be
shipping these by early October, is my guess. If we weren't worth waiting
on those plastic cases, we'd be doing manufacturing right now and I'd be able
to ship even earlier. But I am committing to October twenty twenty three,
maybe earlier. The contesting console is is still in development, but I am
hoping I might be able to start selling these by the end of the year.
I'm pretty darn close to having this ready to go, and if not
by the end of this year, then early next year. I need I
need to order the first one of those. I need to order the first
batch of those. So, uh, Kyle had a question, it's pretty
good. If you moved his adapters from radio to radio, would you need
to reconfigure the adapter in software. So for my adapters, everything here is
analog. There is no software involved anywhere. So if you moved a radio
Pro adapter from radio to radio, the way you would do that is by
removing that configuration board and putting on a different configuration board. You would need
to set up each configuration board for each radio. So all of those those
giant jumper fields come pre configured unless you need to tweak something. But there
are trimpots on there that need to be adjusted for your particular radio. And
again instructions for all of this are in the in the user guide. But
once you have that config board adjusted for that radio, then it's good to
go. You put that config board on that Radio Pro and it will it
will work with that radio. If you need to move the big expensive part
to a different radio, you take out the config board and put in the
config board for that other radio and you're good to go. So you could
effectively have because it looks like the Radio pros about two twenty five correct is
what it says on this Where where did I go shop? You go into
the individual products? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go. So
two twenty five for that, Yes, but for an extra forty bucks you
could configure it for another radio and just and have it multi purpose at that
point in time. The two twenty five includes one configuration board of your choice
for forty dollars. You can add additional configures. Yes, right, okay,
yeah, yeah, that's a better way of saying it. Yeah,
good, okay, perfect. So the user pros are similarly configurable, that
is to say, they come preconfigured, but if you open it up inside,
there's a similar jumper field there. You can assign any signal to any
pin except for the PTT the anyway. Yeah, so these are entirely reconfigurable.
If you buy one for one device, it doesn't mean that it only
ever works for that one device. You can reconfigure any of these to work
with any device if you need to. But that reconfiguration involves like placing and
removing solder blobs, so it's not a quick change from one. It's oh
I sold my flex radio and I bought an icom. You know, it's
that kind of reconfiguration. It's not I'm going to move from this radio to
that radio today and then move it back tomorrow. You can do that with
the configu board on the radio pro, but not with the user pro.
Gotcha. Okay, good, good, Thank you Dennis. Dennis is always
always fun with the comments. Shut up and take my money. You go
to electronics dot Hella, but dot com and you I will take your happily
take your money there. Yeah. Steve KO four AFL has been sharing the
link in the chat, so, in fact, Steve's one of the He
didn't I think the original email I got was from you, Mark, but
then Steve piped up and provided more info and said he already had some of
this stuff, so he does. Yeah, he was one of my early
adopters. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate all your support and everything you've
done to help out over the last couple of years. Excellent. Well,
this looks like a really fun on project. Yeah, hopefully October October time
frame being what it is, that that would be in time for some cooler
weather and some parks on the air before the weather gets too cold in a
lot of places. So I think that I think this is going to be
a winning situation. So thank you. If anybody wants to build one of
these things or a bunch of these things for their club or anything like that,
with my standards advocacy had on, I will help you, not give
me money, Like seriously, I really want this to be adopted, because
these are the things that I'm not going to help you make. The contesting
console is where I want to be, uh, you know, adding value,
not on the adapters themselves. So if you want to start working on
adapters, even if you want to start a company that competes with me,
I will help you make it happen. So reach out to me. Mark
at Electronics do help dot com is my email address or you can use the
contact does on the website. I'm also on mastodon at Smitty at halibut dot
com. Yeah, okay, okay, cool, excellent, Okay, man,
this is this is really cool info. All the all the comments in
the chat have been very positive and people are wanting to know, they're wanting
they're ready to purchase. They're not wanting no window, but they're ready to
purchase whenever it's ready. So I'm gonna I'm gonna throw a ranch into it.
Real quick. Okay, Okay, you set all the good name brands.
What about those other name brands out there that might be from a neighboring
Asian country. Yes, so it will work with all of those because it's
still you know, headphone level or speaker level. Uh. And it's still
electric or dynamic microphones. So, like I, I am not explicitly targeting.
I haven't made any configuration boards specifically for those, right, Okay,
but that is something that you can definitely do. If you have a specific
radio that you want me to do, I will work with you to figure
out what the correct configuration is of that configure board to make it work with
that radio. Like I had a I had a one of the users in
my early adopter program wanted to use the user Pro with a Kenwood style hand
mike. You know the two pin three point five and two point five millimeter
uh that like all the all the radios, all the inexpensive radios use as
their standard interface. Right. He had a headset that he that uses that
interface that's meant to connect into an HT and so he wanted a user Pro
that would work on that. And I don't have that in my standard Arsenal,
so I worked with him to figure out what that configuration would look like,
and I'm totally happy to do that. Okay, I think most of
the Zigu radios use a Yazoo style. Okay, if I'm not mistaken,
are they RJ forty five? Yeah, the G ninety is RG forty five.
I can't remember on the sixty one hundred or the fifty one oh five.
I believe there are RG forty fives. I could be wrong about that,
yeah, but somebody in the chattel no, I'm sure. But but
you know, now you've got BG twofx dot com. I forget his first
right now. Really, nice guy. Really, the the FX four CR
radios, those are yeah, those are coming coming along nicely. And you've
got the ln R precision stuff. Of course, the ln R precision stuff
is CW only, so you're probably not gonna want to worry about that right
now. But but there's there's two or three other models out there that are
that have come along and been a good option for the t X five hundred
from Lab five nine nine. It's a good example and it has those funky
aircraft plugs on it, but it but it comes with an adapter. I
think it comes with like an RG forty five two one of those adapters,
or maybe somebody makes one aftermarket something like that. So yeah, so yeah,
there's there's there's definitely more than just the big five or six, which
if you're if you're into heavy HF, you're probably have one of those anyways.
So I think you've got most of your bases covered. But you know,
I've wanted to know that because if I didn't ask it, someone else
would sure. Absolutely. And the even if the radio pro doesn't come with
a pre configuration for your radio, you can buy what I'm calling my generic
config That is, it just doesn't have any thing assigned on the eight pin
connectors, and you can figure out what pin out you need for yourself and
apply it to that config board. So you can configure these for just about
any radio. Okay. And I only say just about because I hate making
absolute statements because they're too easy to be proven wrong. I can't think of
any Ham radio that these won't work with with the appropriate configuration and the appropriate
cables. Okay, Okay, that's a fair statement. So there's one question
I saw in the chat room. Can I bring it in is that okay,
sure, absolutely? Yeah. From Mike Groves, he asks, are
you in discussion with any of the major manufacturers to incorporate ohis And that is
a mighty fine question, and the answer is I would love to be.
I have approached both Flex and Ellacraft at him mention this year, and I
was still pretty early in my advocacy process at that point, and they I
talked to I don't remember names, and I probably offend people if I got
it wrong, but definitely the CTO at Flex, and I believe the CEO
at Ellacraft, and both of them were like, that's a really good idea.
I don't think it will ever happen, And so I refer to it
as optimistic skepticism. Yeah right right, yeah, And so it's it.
You know, they come from from a viewpoint of they've worked in the industry
forever and trying to get the manufacturers to to agree on anything is problematic,
right, And so that's why I'm starting with adapters, is because I know
just going to the manufacturers and say you should do this is not going to
work until there is traction in the market. Right, radios are starting to
adopt Anderson Power polls on the radios natively themselves. And that's because it has
become a dominant, de facto standard, and it's going to take a long
damn time. The thing that I think is working in my favor here is
that this doesn't have to be a replacement for your existing stuff. This really
should be in addition to your existing connectors, right, just like we have
the data port on the back, right, like the the one that gives
you direct access to the modulator and discriminator and all that stuff and allows you
to do ninety six BOT and stuff like that. That doesn't replace your normal
microphone connector. It's an addition to it, right, I feel like OHIS
could be that. Right, you still have your eight pin g X sixteen
round microphone connector that you've got an entire ecosystem of devices for that you make
a bunch of money on, right, Great, keep doing that. All
I'm asking is that you add it clearly marked RJ forty five, preferably to
the front, but maybe on the back that is an OHIS port and allow
people that if they plug something into there, that that also works and that
is not as big of a burden on the manufacturers. I think it isn't
adding a feature, not replacing something, and having to admit that they are
capitulating to one of the other manufacturers designed standards. Right, So I'm optimistic.
I think the way we get there is by getting the community to say,
yes, I want this, and get the community to be saying I
have to buy an adapter for your radio. It would be much better to
me if I didn't have to buy an adapter, right, and get the
users who are buying these radios to go to the manufacturers and say, I
want you to put this port directly on your radio. And to do that
we need to get adoption. And that's what I'm starting on here. Okay,
well, I wish you luck. I think it's a great idea.
I think I think it's a very good idea. HAM radio has always been
about innovation and standardization anyway, So yeah, in my opinion, so it's
uh, I think I think it's a great idea. If if if you've
got flex and allcraft that are buying into it then or that are excited about
it but but skeptical, then you know, that's yeah, that's that's that's
a step in the right direction. I think, you know, it's going
to be go ahead, I was gonna. I don't want to put words
in their mouth, so do not make the takeaway here. Oh, flex
an Allocraft are working on this. No, flex An Allocraft have made it
very clear to me that they are not interested in doing this until there attraction
in the market, right, So that's what I'm trying to do here,
and the way we get that traction is by doing these adapters. I realized
that my pro adapters are on the pricey side for something that people may not
be feeling a pain point of right now, which is part of the reason
why I'm hoping that somebody else comes along and says I can do that better
and cheaper on the adapters. Great, please do. This is where I
think I'm really adding value and that's what I want to be doing, and
that will just increase adoption. So totally yeah, okay, excellent. Well
once again electronics dot halibut dot com. Steve has shared that link in the
chat several times. You guys, go check that out and if is there
an Yeah, there's a contact button on this page. There is yes,
contact mark all of this stuff. His contact info is right there at that
website that we just shared. So Mark, I appreciate your time today,
buddy. It's uh. It's always good to see new projects, to hear
about new things that Hams are working on and see how it can benefit the
community as a whole. And I think I think you're think you got a
really good start here. Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate you
having me on the show. If you ever want to talk about common mode
current chokes and how to measure them, or satellite antennas with eggnog antennas.
That's the other products I'm working on. If you ever want me to come
on and talk about those, just let me know. I'm right here now.
What is an eggnog antenna? Sorry, egg beater antenna for Satnoggs is
the product that I'm developing that I'm calling eggnogs. My apologies, I okay,
screwed up the verb, Okay, so I know that's okay. Uh.
Yeah. The Sacknoggs guys were at Tapper I think two or three years
ago. Yeah, and I got they did like a three and a half
hour session on Sunday morning. I got all that on video. It's on
my channel. Nice so very complex stuff, but looking at right now.
You can't see it on the camera, but looking right here, I have
a portable rotation rotor from our Finder that interfaces into his Android device and tracks
the satellite for you. Is that the one that he just released on pre
order? Yep? Yeah, so that actually my first product was that never
went to market, is called SORE Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio, and it's an
appliance for operating FM satellites. That's a whole different story we don't have time
to get into now, but one of the very common asks was can you
please build a portable, twelve volt lightweight rotator for satellite antennas? And I'm
like, maybe one of these days, But it looks like our Finder beat
us to it, and their product looked rad It saw a lot of people
wincing at the price, but I'm like, as somebody who's building hardware in
the United States right now during a global semiconductor shortage and is probably a small,
you know, very few number of people in the business, that price
sounds about right to me. Yeah. And it and it does run on
twelve volts and it does have power polls. I plug it into my Gigga
Parts explorer box and done, We're done. I mean, you know,
the the our funding device itself has its own battery, but the actual rotor
runs on twelve volts. So yeah, it's going to be a we're I'm
taking it to the beach next week and you guys will see some some videos
on that, so be interested to talk to you about your about those uh
egg beat or eggnog intens, whatever you're calling them. So whenever you whenever
you want to get back on and do that be a fun project as well.
So awesome, cool, Well, thank you everybody in the chat mark
once again, thank you for your time. We're gonna shut it down.
I wish everyone a happy Wednesday afternoon. And as we said in the beginning
we were talking about all Star, you guys, connect to my node four
three one three six. I am reconnected finally because I got it rebooted last
night, so and it's all working again. So seventy three to all mark
once again, thank you for time. Have a good afternoon, all right,
seventy three is bia good humans everyone exactly