Thank you for choosing to download the ham Radio two point zero audio podcast rip.
This is the audio taken out of a video or a live stream I
did recently. You can catch all my videos on YouTube ham Radio two point
zero and catch us live every Sunday night at seven pm Central Standard Time for
a different topic each week. Thank you for the support, and thank you
for being a member of the community. Okay, I don't know Frank finished
your night, but he was live. I hope you guys caught his live
stream that he should be wrapping up right about now, and he was talking
to the guys from the Go Kit Challenge, which happens here in North Texas,
and it's going to be this coming Saturday, so a week from yesterday.
Okit challenge, And it's the first time I'm going to be attending that
this time. And it's the first time I'm going to be able to attend
that live because it does not fall on HAMSI weekend, which I'll be at
the following weekend. So that that's that's gonna be a cool thing. Come
out to Highland Village next Saturday for the Go Kit Challenge. If you want
more information about that, go catch Frank's live stream that he just finished.
Glenn, thank you for the super chat buddy, thank you for the support.
Special shout out tonight to all the folks in Green Text YouTube channel members.
I saw Andy in their way early. Of course, it wouldn't be
a live stream of Andy Wooden in there like two hours before in ed I
see a C three I k rather is in there. Henry to Crusader,
thanks for joining us, guys, Kady nine w XO, thanks for joining
us, Tom Wayne, ted w There's a Joe in there and a couple
others. Yeah, thanks for thanks for being out here. Tonight is in
the chat? Has this Cigarzo sent me? So is O sent me?
When Kylin and I went to Connecticut a few months ago last fall, sometime,
I bought a bunch of stouts locally and I gave him to Donna,
said hey, I'll send you a shipping label. And I forgot and he
hit me up like a week ago and he's like, hey, do you
still want this beer? Is it good? I was like, oh,
yeah, it's good. It's a stout. They're all good. So I
sent him a shipping label. Now I'm drinking straight from Connecticut to stouts tonight
Peanut butter and fluff flavored stout from New England Dreams. New England Dreams,
I guess is Woodland Farms Brewery. I don't know what New England Dreams is.
Maybe that's the name of the style of something I don't know, but
anyway, peanut butter stout tonight is the first beer I've had in a week
and a half. So cut cut back a little bit once the new year
started. So thanks for joining is to thank you Donn. He sent me
a really good cigar as well, and I smoked that yesterday. It was
good, all right, So guys, one thing real quick. I was
out of town for the last week, week and a half almost. We
got back home yesterday, spent uh. Went to Galveston a week and a
half ago, spent a couple of nights there. Went to the Houston ham
Fest last weekend. That was a fun show and stayed through the weekend and
through next week, uh through the following week which was got to do some
parks on the air and that kind of stuff, and so thanks for thanks
to those who worked me on parks on the air. Took my wife out
to do her first first parks on the air on Friday, two days ago.
On Friday, So I've got something. Something fouled up with the logging
software and I got it was logging. I was logging for her and it
was logging as my call signed. So I got to put it through ady
if Master and fix all that. But that's easy. It's easy to do.
But during that time when I was out of town, all of the
Edfong antennas came back into stock. I've got Edfong roll up J poles or
that's the dual band and PVC J pole. I've got the roll up J
pole and I've got the GMRS no band version back in stock. So those
are back in stock on the website. You guys can go check that out.
I'll share the link in the chat right there. And because i've been't
gotten a lot of emails, a lot of dms from people saying what about
ed fonginten is when are they gonna come back in stock? And just with
my traveling and everything, I just and he he ran kind of short on
supply there for a while, but I think he's he started shipping again and
they arrived when I was out of town. So that's where that is.
But just wanted to share that real quick. So tonight we're gonna be talking
about M seventeen. M seventeen is the newest as far as I know.
I think it's still the newest because it's not even really out yet. Kind
of sort of we're gonna get I'm gonna get the guys to explain it to
you. So it's the newest digital voice mode in amateur radio, and it
is on an open source codec called CODEC two. So we did the first
I went back and looked that up. Those of you who are on my
email list, I went and looked up that that first live stream I did
with Steven ed it was in twenty nineteen. Yeah, ninth, No,
it was twenty twenty one, twenty twenty one, and and I linked that
and they went through and they explained everything with M seventeen. So I linked
linked that in my email. I'll find the link and I'll share it with
you guys here again a little bit, but I'll get them to give a
very brief overview. But this is not going to be a hey intro TOM
seventeen, here's what it's all about type thing. We're going to talk about
the latest and greatest updates to it tonight. So let me bring uh,
let me bring them in real quick. Make sure I click on the right
button here and get that going. Hey, guys, what's going on.
Good evening to everybody. Hei you doing, Jason Chip, first time on
the stream, buddy, how are you? I'm well, Jason. Thanks
for having us. We appreciate it. Man absolutely, yeah, Steve Ed,
how are you guys doing. I'm doing great. How are you going
good? Right? Well, it's it's not cold anymore. It was sixty
five today, which I didn't think was too bad. It was sat outside
on the on the back porch, and I can't complain with that. I
just got back from the Virgin Islands literally like not long ago. Wow.
Yeah, Now back in Minnesota, Oh my gosh, yeah, no,
thank you. Oh, that's that's that they out of. They ought to
be a jail sentence for somebody. If you if you commit a crime in
Version Islands, you got to go spend a month in Minnesota in the winter,
in the winter, in the winter. Yeah, that's uh, that's
that's terrific. Well, thanks for joining us tonight, all three of you.
I know that I know that you guys got some really cool information for
us, and and I just learned that D will be at the you guys
are going to be representing M seventeen there. I assume a couple of weekends
from now at at HAM size. Is that right? No, I'm I'm
just going on my own. I think it's Oh are you okay? It's
great program. I'll have some some teen swag, some stickers and stuff.
If anybody'll be there, good, Okay, I will be there. I
already have my plane tickets booked and awesome. We'll be up there for for
the the third or fourth time I've been to the HAMSI conference. So it's
a fun, fun event. A bunch of stuff that's over my head,
but it's fun to listen to regardless. So all right, why don't one
of you, I don't care who does it? Who whoever wants to give
us a very brief two or three four minute overview elevator pitch about what the
heck M seventeen is something a little bit more expanded on when than what I
just said. Then we'll kind of dive into the to the next stuff from
there. Steve, I'll start real quick. Yeah, go ahead, all
right. So M seventeen was started in Poland in twenty nineteen by SB five.
WWP this guy right here, boycheck, he's so sexy. He's uh.
You guys at your you guys at your faces. Everybody at Orlando thought
edded something to happened to because they had Ed's face on their hamside on their
M seventeen table in Orlando. It's funny. Go ahead, man, I
got a lot of condolence texts for recovery. Oh my goodness, that's great.
So it was started in twenty nineteen in Poland by Void check. He
uh. He was looking for an alternative to the the current digital modes that
were out there. At dmr D Star Diffusion. Everybody was using some sort
of a commercial codec, so we started experimenting with CODEC two, which was
created by Dave David road Down in Australia, another Ham radio operator, so
he started playing around with that. He designed an open source HT called the
TR nine at the time. So back in twenty nineteen, there were some
pictures of Voicheck on the internet. ABE six Nu I think covered the story
first, and it was just a bare board HT that he had. It
was just a couple of PCBs, and he started throwing that out there on
Reddit and some of the social media platforms, and he started gaining a lot
of interest in it, and he picked up Steve as one of the first
members besides Voychek, one of the first in the group. I came along
about a year or so later, and since then it's grown into a community,
worldwide community of like minded individuals who were getting back into the the spirit
of making and breaking and experimenting with ham radio, just like our forefather fathers
before us. So we've been playing around with a lot of hardware, a
lot of software, tweaking the protocol and yeah, that's pretty much. Yet,
are you still running net control for that weekly net ed when I can?
I've been a little negligent in my duties, but we run a weekly
net every Friday at seventeen thirty seventeen hundred hours UTC. And remind me.
There's a piece of software you can install on a Linux box. It might
be available for Windows, but that you can just use to talk into the
seventeen network. I forget what that is though, Voice M voice. Yeah,
so you can run invoice on a Raspberry Pie with a USB headset and
you can get into the net. Cool. Okay, awesome, Well,
thank you, thank you for that explanation. Looking forward to seeing what you
guys have have changed tonight, because I know there's been some cool updates since
Steve has got an HT to show us that he showed us some minute to
go. But I got to say hi to Frank because I don't want him
yelling in the background like he does. So what's up, Frank? Not
Not much, man, not much. I love seeing y'all's booth this year
over at Orlando. It was a great booth, and I will tell you
it scared the living crap out of me at first because I got though and
they had Edge's picture I know, you're just talking about it, and they
had a black curtain around it, and I was like, what happened?
What happened to Ed? What happened? They're like, oh, no,
that was that was a total accident. We didn't put that black you know,
tablecloth around it or anything. It just happened to be there. That
was. Yeah. I mean I kind of asked the same thing. I'm
like, is there a story here? No, he just couldn't make it
this weekend. I was like, oh, okay, good. I wanted
to swing back around, and I was asked one of the guys. I
forgot who it was. I was like, let's do an interview, but
you just hold Edge's picture up and just talk through the picture of the entire
time. That's good. That awesome, awesome. I don't know if I
could do the accent correctly. You can't. You can't do it, Steve,
and I can do it because that's where we're from over there. Yeah,
Steve has that very subtle accent that you don't really notice until he starts
talking about cars and they get and it really it really comes out. Yeah,
it's like, damn, dude, Now I want to for some reason,
I want to Sam Adams. I don't know why. Yeah, yeah,
good, all right, So uh so, uh well, Steve,
why don't you go ahead and talk about this, uh this icon radio?
Sure? So, well, we've got okay, so we've got that,
and let you talk about that, and then we've got this little thing and
and I know at one time, at one point in time, and we
can talk about this a little bit later. I know that Bob at our
Finder had was working with you guys on doing an actual RF module in the
r finder device as well, So I don't know where the status is on
that. Maybe we could spend another maybe we could spin that up on another
live stream and invite Bob on as well. But but yeah, show up
Bob's fun, Bob's fun. I always get really good comments because Bob,
Bob and I have a banter we do, and people email me after that
they're like, dude, that was funny. Do that again, Like,
okay, cool, we'll do that a good But yeah, Steve, go
ahead to show us that icon radio and tell us tell us all about what
you what you're working on with that. So if people haven't been following along
with us on Discord, that's where a lot of our development actually happens at
least, you know, the talking and everything like that. Everybody develops on
their own machines and everything. But Manuel over in Belgium, he's helping develop
the micro seventeen, which is a add on module that you can put inside
and existing radio. So we're targeting radios such as the Motorola GM series.
I think over here it's a CDM series basically like the old WAREUS modems or
Radius modem modems. Radios and you know, there's there's places that you can
put like an additional board for digital signal processing inside them. But Manuel over
over there in Belgium, he actually came into possession of a handful of different
types of ICOM radios, which are the they're kind of older idass radios.
They're they're digital you know radios that the Icon started making, and it's based
off of NXDN, So it's a it's an older NXDN radio kind of like
the first implementation of what they had, I believe, and uh, inside
those radios is actually a module that can be put in and turn the radio
into a digital you know, digital radio. Right now, they're I mean,
they can either be analog or digital. But in order to enable that
digital mode, there's a there's a little signal processing board that goes inside.
And so the idea is to have a module that can go inside this radio.
And this is the this is one of them right here. It's kind
of fuzzy because I'm blurring my background, but this is an Icon F forty
one D. It is a commercial you know, off the shelf eyed ass
radio. But this has the ability to have that little module built in and
do all that digital signal processing. So we're sitting so Manuel's like, well,
let's test it out and see what happens. They have a little breakout
board that they were able to wire a Module seventeen into a First they did
a which is I believe the thirty thirty sixty something still an ICON. Yeah,
it's still icon. Yeah, it's the same family radios that they have.
And then they have an HT version. So they've tested on the mobile
version first with a Module seventeen and it sounded amazing. There's some videos on
YouTube that show the development process that Manuel and his team there over in Belgium
worked on in order to get the radios to modulate M seventeen with an off
board modem. So they basically took an off board modem, plugged it in
using a breakout board inside the radio. They got it to work. So
then they tried it with an HT and that worked as well. And then
I'm not even going to bother trying to say his name, but there's another
fellow that developed the actual board that goes inside the the UH goes inside these
radios. His call sign is TA one MD and he actually did the development,
actually created the board and now we're actually producing like engineering samples for us
through PCB way. They should be here in about a month, and then
we're basically just gonna plug it into one of these blurry radios see what happens.
So this will be one of the first modified modified and is kind of
a loose term that we're using, but it's going to be a modified radio
that will do M seventeen without actually having to solder or anything. There's a
couple of jumpers that you have to cut. I think there is one jumper
that you have to solder, but that's super simple, and then you just
plug the module in and then with the firmware that's being developed, probably going
to be open RTX, you'll be able to do M seventeen right off of
an old, you know, icon NXDN radio. And I was just telling
Jason earlier, I said, look, if if you want to buy the
radio, you can buy the radio. It's not it's not super expensive.
And even if the whole I'm seventeen thing doesn't really come to fruition, which
I believe that it's very strongly going to happen. I mean, don't don't
get me wrong, but even if like through the whole development process. It
takes a whole lot longer. You know, you still got a nice little
NXDN radio, so you know, it's no big deal. But yeah,
that's that's the latest and greatest thing that kind of caught everyone's attention. But
we do have a few other things that are going on as well. So
good, Okay, how far do you want me to go? No,
we can. We can pause there for a moment. Some people are asking
for for the link to your discord. So if you guys will share that
with Frank in the zoom chat. You can't you can't post r ls in
the YouTube chat because of spammers. I haven't turned off right, but Frank
can. Frank. Frank has admin access to the to the chat, so
put it in the zoom chat and then Frank you can drop it into the
YouTube chat. But so some people are asking for the for that, and
then Jody wants to know, is there really any real obstacle to adding M
seventeen board to any radio that can also do nine k six aprs ninety six
hundred ninety six ninety six hundred bod Yeah, I think is what do you
mean? Basically, that's just describing the fact that you have direct discriminator access
as well as being able to modulate straight through without going through any sort of
signal processing on the board. And generally, yes, if it is ninety
six hundred BOD capable, it should be able to. But there's a lot
of radios that are out there that are described as ninety six hundred BOD capable,
but it's only for what is it the g G something r u H
protocol, which is is kind of like a forty eight hundred BOD you know,
modem over the air, and it's not wide enough for M seventeen.
So M seventeen has a nine killer hurts wide signal, and some of these
older ninety six hundred radios don't have that bandwidth available. So as long as
the modulation or the deviation parameters on the radio are at least you know,
five killer hurts, it should be okay, because I will give you ten
killer hurts across the you know, the actual bandwidth path path. For the
most part, we've been having great luck with the YUFTM six thousand dual bander,
which is I think it's sub three hundred bucks, So we've had really
good luck with this. So the Okay, so that I've got that one
in a little go kit that I take out with a It's in a tech
prepper Man pac go kit and I take it out when I go camping in
RV and I put it up with the with the ed Funk J pole.
So that's an AD on board for that radio for the Module seventeen. You've
seen it. We've advertised it at a bunch of the shows you've been to.
I do recognize that I didn't realize it worked it or I'd forgotten maybe
it worked in that radio. Yeah. You can pick up the newest version
of this actually right on Lilygo and with the the LCD screen in it.
It's under forty bucks. Nice. Okay, Well I'm gonna have to.
I'll see if I get Frank that link. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
I give Frank that link too. Basically nothing else. A lot of
people are like, well, why don't you have a mo A radio compatibility
list, I mean there's already ones out there. If it if you can
modulate DMR on the radio, you can do N seventeen. Yeah. The
parameters are pretty much the same, and DMR actually has stricter parameters than any
other mode. So I don't want to say DMR is like the gold standard
for you know, the my parameters and everything like that. But because of
the way that DMR is modulated, it has these really strict parameters that it
has to be compliant with. So if it can do DMR, then it
can do M seventeen. And Brandmeister actually has a list of radios that have
been tested and generally that list also follows with M seventeen. Okay, okay,
excellent. I got to click on that myself because I definitely want to
add that to my You can buy one. No, I never did.
I never did buy one of those. I don't remember why, but you
know what I did do. I bought so So there was a gentleman.
I don't think it was Chip here, but it was somebody he was taking,
uh was it an MD three eighty or three ninety, and then modified
himself. You could order it from him? Oh for you? Is that?
Mike? Yeah, Mike, Mike, Yeah, he's a man.
And I ordered one of those, and I waited like two to three months.
I got this email from him. He's like, guys, I'm sorry,
I just got inundated with orders. I'm refunding everybody, and he did,
yeah, and I told him, I said, you can keep mine.
Just I don't really care how long it takes. And I just I
think he stopped doing it. I don't know what. I don't know what
the status of that is today. But uh, yeah, I was looking
forward to getting something that that was hacked by somebody other than me. But
uh, you know, but yeah, so I know it's been available on
several different models of radio in the past, so but I I never have
bought one of those boards. But that's that's awesome. That Now does this
this this module seventeen board for the how does that connect? How does that
interface to the FtM six thousand or to any other radio? Do you have
to do you have to take out a board and saw it or something?
Is it just right through? Oh? Okaytor okay. You basically buy the
Yasu cable with the bare end and then solder up to the D nine.
Gotcha? Okay, okay? Do you have a list of radios that that
board will use or it can be used with. So we've we've tried it
with the the yu FtM six thousand. We've had the most success there.
Tony down in Australia, he has his hook No, does he have his
hooked up to the eight eighteen? I think I don't know if it's an
eight eighteen seventeen, but some of those sebody in the community uses one of
the eight seventeen, eight eighteen and uh the V the V seventy one from
Kenwood and I think all of those radios have the dB twenty five port in
the back. What about your uh, your monobandalinkos that are really popular with
the all star crowd. You ever tried that? So I have a pair
of the linkos. I haven't actually tested it yet. There is some caveats
that I've heard about as far as you know getting the ninety six hundred BOD
working on those radios. I just haven't tested it yet, okay, And
Frank, I just put it a link to the radio compatibility list. Those
are the radios that we have actually tested in the lab to work, or
others have tested in their you know, homes and whatnot to verify that they
work. And if there's any sort of special notes there, they're right there
in the list with a radio model. Good okay, Oh yeah, that's
a nice list. Yeah, yeah, okay, there's a number of radios
on there that that's impressive. Right, Yeah, so get your Redivus t
y ts uh four different icons seven six two g I light mode, my
eyes, my eyes, my face, just that a whole lot brighter here.
Yeah, it is light mode, that's true. The more people that
can help out, the larger that list can get, you know what I
mean, the more the contributors that we get, that list can can grow
over time and that and that's the goal. That's really the goal. Absolutely,
absolutely, We're always looking for developers. We're looking for more people to
build the community. Chip is probably one of our newer members of the community,
of the team. It's fault too. He's the one who recruited me,
picked him up like a stray cat. Nobody wanted to talk to this
guy and said, I'm afraid of that guy, but I'm going to reach
out anyway. And look what we've built. I mean, it's amazing,
it's amazing. Yeah, So let me go ahead and talk about a couple
of other things that are that are here. I'll get I'll get to you
know, why chips here in a minute. But Kay, there's so Ed
did a really good job of explaining you know, where we came from.
But moving forward to the future, the project is going to be not just
hardware and software. We want to build a community around the ideas of open
source hardware and software and amateur radio. There seems to be a lot of
you know, a lot of people talk about fragmentation out there and whatnot.
We want to kind of gather all of the stuff together and be that central
source of information and help and development and innovation in amateur radio. So we're
growing out of just being a protocol and just hardware modifications to being a much
larger group of individuals that are like minded want to see improvements in amateur radio
from amateur radio operators, not just the commercial vendors that are out there force
feeding us, you know, hardware and closed software. So with that in
mind, that's why Chip is here. Chip actually started developing his own i'll
say fork of pie Star, and you know, he had a dashboard that
you know, improved upon what was available from pie Star, and it's now
grown from that to a much larger and independent distribution for hotspots and repeaters and
Chip, if you want to go ahead and you know, talk about a
little bit of what you do, then that'd be great. But yeah,
Chip joined us last year around October. Yeah, so yeah, M seventeen
SOPSD has been. I started it in around twenty twenty, and it was
a it was a fork of Andy's Wonderful Pie Star. And by the way,
Andy and I actually worked together can In fact, I talked to him
yesterday. I mean we still worked together, sharing each other's code and whatnot.
But some of the changes I made were just so wholesale that it just
warranted its own It merited its own fork years ago. And one of the
things that was important to me was the native M seventeen implementation. That was
that was a very very big thing to me because you know, thirty years
in it retired now, and most of those thirty years was just implementing open
source types of software protocols things like that. So the M seventeen thing was
really important to me. And so, you know, one of the WPSD
firsts was that the native M seventeen support, and that was that was pretty
awesome. And then it was Ed last year. I think he reached out
to me and said, hey, you know, you should be part of
the whole M seventeen team. And then the rest is history. We all
just clicked. They said, hey, we'd love to have you as part
of the overall umbrella. So WPSD became a subproject of the M seventeen project.
So it was it was really the perfect marriage, just because you know,
you could search my name out there. I've been doing open source for
so many years, the Apache project, Linux Kernel, FreeBSD, all of
it. It just it just kind of made sense, and it's actually been
a really cool thing. And like Steve said, it's it's building a community,
and it's building this this whole overarching thing. It's it's really difficult to
explain. Sometimes it's just not a protocol like Steve mentioned, and I fully
agree with that, it's this whole ecosystem where it's there's no vendor lock in,
there's no codec lock in, there's there's just all kinds of cool stuff
going on. And the really cool thing too, is and I got to
give props to Andy Taylor from Pistar is you know, he's also been doing
the same thing as of late as well. You know, he's updated his
stuff to implement native M seventeen. He and I have been working together.
He's using some a wpsd's code. We're making this much larger ecosystem that actually
benefits thousands and thousands and thousands of him radio operators across the globe, and
we're really proud of it, and we're seeing the growth. We track the
growth and it's it's really exciting. Hey, thanks Ed for We don't know
what he's thinking for I know Ed ed broken. Yeah, okay, yeah,
I was wondering if that was on my side, but on Chips side,
yeah, Chip your your zoom's going a little bit. And now there
at the end the rest of the most pop interesting all right cool? Well
yeah, well you're the man, Ed. You know. He and I
grew up pretty close to each other, and he said, you need to
join this project. So I did and everything just clicked from there and it
was the perfect marriage, so to speak. So I'm appreciative because it was
a one man show and now WPSD has hosts of contributors and developers. I
couldn't do it by myself and now we have a team, and it's just
it's been really really it's been a lot more fun. It's been a lot
more fun. It's definitely a great community. We are bringing in people from
all different parts of HAMM Radio, all different parts of computers, and we're
getting the hacker a maker group of people to take notice of us as well.
And that's where the future of our hobby is with the hackers, the
makers and awesome projects like open rtx and M seventeen and free dv you bet,
you bet awesome? Is it? Well? Two questions I have Number
one, what program you guys said you're looking for developers? What programming language
are you primarily working in? C plus plus is mostly what we use.
The reflector software is written in C plus plus. M REFD but that's a
reflector software. I'm sorry. M Voice is written a C plus plus.
All of the m M d v M stuff I believe is C plus plus.
That's correct, Okay. MM DVM is kind of separate, but we
use a lot of their, you know, software for development in the in
the in the community, there's a few people out there that are working in
Python, myself and a bunch of others. There's uh some rust programming that's
going on, some go laying stuff that's happening as well. Obviously for the
hotspot, you know, the dashboard stuff that's uh in PHP right now,
but it may change if I can get up off my button actually start getting
That means Steve and I both because we both have goals for the dashboard.
We'd like it to be a lot more portable and self contained. That's a
very very large goal for us. But dashboard for for for the new pie
Star, or the dashboard for something specific to seventeen for WPSD for WPSD yeah,
okay, yeah, And Steve and I are both go Lang guys,
and I've done some proof of concepts. It's it's a large, large effort
to port that into something like go Lang or rust. But the goal would
be for that to be as portable as possible, so it can run on
anything anything. Yeah, no weird dependencies. It's just a binary that runs
on anything. Is it accurate to say that you can with with the the
WSP I'm sorry, WPSD or whatever you call it. Sorry, that's an
acronym challenge. The new version of pie Star that includes seventeen, can you
cross connect so I can use a DMR or as system fusion radio to talk
into an M seventeen reflector and get on the net. Is that a thing
yet? So? Not quite yet, and I'm gonna let Steve go.
I'm gonna let Steve talk about this because there are copyright things to talk about
here. So there's there's a lot of people have asked that question, and
it's a good question to ask because it's like, you know, you have
this one mode that's you know, coming out, it's brand new and everything.
There's there's a handful of people that are using it on a regular basis,
but everybody else is still on d m R or Fusion or P twenty
five or d Star or whatever. And unfortunately, when you're on one network,
it's hard to talk to the other. There is no direct way to
get from M seventeen to d m R, at least not on a hot
spot. There's a lot of licensing that's involved. A lot of people talk
about the patents. You know it because DMR uses a CODEC called AMB two
plus or NB plus two two plus two plus two yeah something plus anyway,
it's it's not a codec that's compatible with what M seventeen uses, which is
CODEC two. Amby is the intellectual property of dvs I, and they license
out their codec to whoever wants to implement their voice codec into you know whatever
protocol. It's not just DMR, it's not just P twenty five for fusion
or anything. There's a bunch of protocols that use dvsi's voicecodec. Correct.
And because there's no interoperability between CODEC two and m B two plus, you
can't directly cross mode between the two. There are methods on doing this,
and a lot of it has to deal with well minor plugged in right now,
but I have a couple of thumb DV sticks from Northwest Digital Radio.
I plug those into a computer and I run a reflector that actually transcodes between
the two modes actually quite quite well. And that's the legal way of doing
it. There is a software based vocoder that will do m B two plus
and it will run on a PIE, but the legality of it is very
very questionable, correct, And that's why we just don't distribute it with WPSD.
You know. Yeah, we leave that up to the users if they
want to compile that stuff and you know, get that transcoding working on a
software level, because it's literally using hacked firmware. Uh am, I correct,
Steve, isn't it using like the Yeah? So I'm doing this stuff
for free. I'm a fifty year old retired it guy. I don't I
don't need the I don't need the legal stuff coming after an open source Yeah
exactly, So no thanks, But yeah, Steve hit the nail on the
head. It would be really cool if we could do it. But yeah,
DVSI, you know, they're they have an incredibly wonderful, robust business
model. I mean, every single rig you buy that's using digital radio,
whether it's YSF, DMR, I mean, you're you're paying that as a
consumer. You're paying those licensing fees because of course those are passed on to
the consumer. The manufacturers are just going to pass that on. I think
the going rate is like fifty to seventy five dollars per per unit these days,
is what you're what you're paying as a consumer. So yeah, that's
why your digital radios are a little bit more than some of your some of
your analog radios a little bit. So yeah, we have to we have
to be really really careful with with some there is you have to be really
careful with our internet connections. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's why.
Yeah, Okay, go along with what Chips saying, Yeah, that it's
you know, we're just so people and yeah, oh now you're now your
audio is lagging behind your video. I think he's done. Okay, go
ahead, go ahead, Steve. Yeah, So it's not necessarily just about
patent. It's about copyright and intellectual property. So even though a patent may
expire on something, the people that wrote the code still have a license on
that code. So even though you can you may eventually be able to freely
implement the voice codec, you have to write the software yourself. And unfortunately,
there are no open source versions of AMBI two plus. I mean,
there is an open source version of amby the old AMBI and old imbe,
but the one that everybody's using now, there's there's no open source for it.
So somebody would have to write it in order for it to be a
legal comply legally with you know what's out there. So when when the patent
expires, if it expires, then somebody has to write something for it.
Gotcha. Okay, well then answers that question. That's a good question.
Yeah, go ahead. Frank gray Man Potas says he is very proficient at
MS front page. Can that help out with the project? Nope? It
sounds like something Tim would say. Yeah. So all right, so what
is new? So what's the we've talked about? Uh? I mean the
list of radios you guys shared was new since the last time we spoke,
for sure. And the WPSD things I know I'm saying that wrong is is
new also, But so what are what are some other new things that that
you guys have working on right now? I know you've got this, Uh,
you've got this lily goo right here. Yep, that's gonna be This
is This is the four thirty two megahertz version, is what they call it.
It's a monoband and it comes with a bunch of jumpers and and it
comes with a couple of doll aboards that go into the side here, like
like riser type boards that go and you can you can kind of makerspace your
own radio on this. You could just plug it up and do a straight
analog four hundred and forty megahertz radio, of course. But then there's a
new version, Steve you were telling me about that's that's about to drop that
will be compatible with one of your boards or have the board built into it
or something like that. So tell us more about that a little bit sure.
Uh So the one that you're holding right now is the original we can
I mean, everybody that I talked to calls it the T Tower the try
So that was a that was basically a DOV board that was developed by Lilygo
by themselves, you know, doing their own thing. It takes the prevalent
or ubiquitous rather r F chip or RF module and they basically attached an e
s P thirty two to it and now you have like a little SP thirty
two walkie talkie. A lot of the open rtx development has been around different
modules that they can use to transmit things like M seventeen using their firmware.
And when that was discovered, a lot quite a few people actually said,
hey, let's see if we can put M seventeen on this or at least
open rtx. So they got open rtx to work on it. But the
M seventeen side of it, on the on the first iteration of their board
wasn't very easy to do as far as the voice side is concerned. It
can do M seventeen in a packet mode, but the voice part of it,
there's the audiopaths aren't correct to get into the MCU in order to be
able to modulate the voice into M seventeen digital voice, so analog voice in
M seventeen digital voice. With that, we went to Liligo and asked if
they could re spin their radio with the paths that we need in order to
be able to modulate M seventeen and they said sure. So we worked or
open our TX work with them in order to get the board redesigned for that
audiopath. And now it is a very solid possibility that M seventeen will be
M seventeen voice will be capable on the new version, so the T Tower,
I think they'll call it the two point one and that will be coming
out. Jeez. We got the engineering prototype in or well yeah, the
open ARTACS got the engineering prototypes back in late February, and you know,
obviously there's a bunch of development that needs to happen and everything. So as
soon as we get an answer that says, hey, yes, we were
able to successfully put M seventeen on it, then you'll probably see you know,
that model being sold with the ability to do M seventeen right now.
It doesn't come with any firmware. There was no firmware written for it that
they can put onto it to make it like off the shelf. But you
know, the programming side of it, you know, that's that's what makes
everything interesting, you know, being able to hack it and put it together
yourself kind of thing. You know that, at least that's what I go
for, you know too, if somebody wanted to order that, correct me
if I'm wrong. Lilygo sells two versions of it, one with firmware and
one without. They actually sell four versions. Okay, So there's there's a
UHF and a vh version that already has the firmware that is required to operate
the the radio module on it, and then they also have a VHF and
UHF version that has no firmware on the radio module at all, and you
can put your own firmware on it, and that firmware is also being developed
by people over on open rtx. It is kind of an interesting way of
programming. But you know, it basically comes to you as as a blank
module that you put your own firmware on, so it will be completely open
source for you. But yeah, there are four versions. There's the VHF
and UHF with the firmware, and then there's a VHF and UHF they call
the Open editionition. Yeah yeah, and that's the one that doesn't come with
any firmware, but you got to put it on yourself, so it becomes
like a truly open source radio, you know, discovery platform. Really.
Yeah, that's that's what I got. I got the Open Edition. That's
what this one is here. So I'm going to have fun trying to figure
out how to put the firm on it. But but that's some cable that
you need for It's kind of kind of tricky, is it. Yeah,
it's got a USB C port on the side of it here, but I
can I guess they can't make it that easy, can they. That's for
charging. That's for charging, okay, and also talking to the esp This
sounds like a job for ham nuggets I see Teo doing. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, that might work. But but yeah, that's the open that's
the open edition right there. So but you said the new one will be
called like the two point one or two point zero or something like that.
Yeah, give me this second, I'll pull up all right, So don't
don't go buy that one right now down because I saw you open asking that
question. This one will not this one will not do seventeen. I actually
purchased this. It took about a month to get this, well maybe yeah,
about a month to get this in. I actually purchased this because I
saw I was reading like a either a Reddit post or an Instagram post or
something. I was reading up on some of this meshtastic stuff, and lily
Goo makes a bunch of meshtastic items and pieces of hardware. So I was
reading up on this. I'm like, oh, that sounds like it might
be fun. So I purchased this. And then about a week later I
saw Steve at Hamkesh and he's like, oh, yeah, we're working on
a new version of that. I'm like, of course you were. I
just purchased the old version. So yeah. But so I'm gonna have to
go buy another one when it comes out. But that's okay. It's all
good experiment quick and you can see them here we go. Okay, let
me fix that. It always goes full screen on me for some reason.
Okay, so all right, yeah, the new version, so same battery,
same screen. They improved the speaker and the microphone locations, but that
is right now, just running their in house firmware. Same idea, but
with the audio paths opened up for us so that we can do you know,
M seventeen over that radio. So I would need to get a hold
of that radio once it's available and then download HIM seventeen firmware from you guys
and flash it and be able to use it that way. That that basically
the process. Yep. There's also a possibility that they would preload the firmware
for you on it, because that's one of the things that when we were
developing the module seventeen they were asking about and they said, yeah, we
can. We can you know, do it with a with a test if
you want, you know, if you give us a test firmware. I
don't know if they actually did that, but you know, there's there's a
possibility that if we get a test firmware developed for them, they'll go ahead
test it and then ship it out with and make it a commercial off the
shelf radio. But the other thing that a lot of people are asking is
like, well, it's just a bare board, you know, do you
have cases for it and all that other stuff. So once you get the
engineering samples in, we can develop the cases and all the other stuff.
Yeah, there is a case for this TWR plus. Yeah. I downloaded
and I sent it to Kyle and was like, hey, this for me.
He's like, okay, he was in he was in Florida. From
that, I think he's going to print it for me this month. But
any time I get a three D printing project, I sent it to Kyle
and was like, hey, I owe you some sun drop. He's like,
all right, this is cool. There you know, perfect Mike,
I can print that for you. Yeah, Mike could probably do it too.
Yeah, he's got a three D printer now too. That's true.
And there are there are files available for the module seventeen too to uh the
print cases. We have them on our githube. Good. Good to know.
That's right. Okay, perfect, Well, that'd be a nice addition
to my sixth day FtM six thousand kid for sure. So okay. And
like I, like I said earlier, and I keep saying it everywhere I
go, it's it's projects like this that No, this is the new homebrewing.
This is this is the future of our hobby. This is going to
attract the the the younger crowd, and we're going to get people from the
maker and and hacker communities that are, you know, willing to play around
and brick there possibly brick their hds by putting an experimental firmware. So yeah,
I've only done it a few times, right right righteesh okay, totally
worth it though, oh, absolutely totally worth it. Absolutely so cool guys.
Well okay, what h or what? Oh? Okay? So what's
this? Now? This is that module that I was talking about, the
icon Okay, so this is this is what it will go inside, you
know, that icon radio. So there's a connector that's down here that for
some reason is not being rendered. But yeah, this is just this tiny
little thing. It's thirty millimeters twenty millimeters and you just stick it right in
there it Yeah, you dupe it. And yeah, that's that's the whole
the whole idea behind that. You know, you just drop it into your
handheld or your mobile and with the right firmware you can modulate them seventeen Yeah.
Nice okay, and it uh so does that from or come on the
board or you have to flash it after it's in the radio. You would
need to flash it before it goes into the radio. I believe that they
are also trying to figure out a way to do it via serial protocol through
the programming cable or if not, through the connector on the back end of
the mobile radio. I believe that this this connector on the side here will
give you serial access as well, so it is a possibility to be able
to flash it through the radio. I'm not one hundred percent sure. I
would have to ask questions to the right people for that. Okay, the
great person is in the chat? Which one is in the chat? Yeah,
he said a minute ago, he said, it's two am there,
still a few days ago before being in the same time zone. Have a
good night. So he went for a little bit answering questions. Okay,
what the best place to stay abreast of all of these things is our discord
channel. We do everything in our discord you know, come on in.
We have a lot of different channels, and we have some bridges to go
to Matrix and some of the other open source chat platforms. But that's the
best way to get a hold of anybody on the team. There's usually somebody
there from the team, probably about twenty two hours a day. Oh yeah,
it's quite vibrant, I would say, quite vibrant. Good, So
in theory, if I took my my bridge Com repeater, which I have
an MMDVM one and flashed it with this, say the acronym chip. What
is that again, WPSD, WPSD. Yeah, if I put that on
my bridge Com repeater which has seventeen, and then I got this icom radio,
I could talk into them seventeen network into the reflectors where the net is
where all the other traffic is. Correct, my icon through via RF through
with the icon RF into the repeater into the network. Is that Is that
accurate? That is accurate? Those bridge Comm repeaters are pretty cool because they're
essentially they're essentially a hotspot. You know, they're running Raspberry pie They have
the m m DVM software which is the foundation of w PSD and pie star.
Really and without Jonathan's hard work G four KLX, I mean we wouldn't
be in this chat really, but yeah, I mean essentially that would be
completely compatible. Everything would would work out of the box. And I can
I can vouch for it because I have one that's just on the other side
of the house. Oh yeah, it's it's up and running and I use
uh, geez, what do I usually use? You have droid Star on
an Android phone with a zum Spot USB modem, and I use that to
talk into the Peter and back. You could also use M voice I'm not
I'm sorry not M voice M seventeen client, which turns a hot spot into
a like a base station radio Module seventeen. I've done it with a Module
seventeen and FtM six thousand. Looking forward to getting that icon on the air
with M seventeen. But yeah, the Bridgecom digital repeaters, like Chuck said,
are MMDVM based repeaters, and they do work, and it will do
M seventeen and I've got yeah, I mean, I've been running Bridge Calm
backyard Peter here at the house for several years. It's just got the the
regular old pie star on an MMDVM and I connected into actually have a HB
link server running, so it's actually connected to my c bridge. Actually I
have an MMDVM repeater connected to my sabridge it and it's got some Brandmeister stuff
on it too. But but it were I mean, it's been running in
the house for three four years. Yeah like that, Yeah, or missed
a beat, so yeah, there you go. Yeah, I have one
hundred empower one hundred. I have one hundred watt amplifier for it. Since
I don't have a good antenna up I don't, I never turn on the
amplifier, so it's just running like five watts right now. But but it
works. It works very very well. So yeah, I'll probably just take
another micro SD card and switch them out, flash the new the new version
on there that adds in seventeen, and just be able to switch it back
and forth when I want to. That's probably what I'm gonna do with you.
Just still have to making sure that it's on the most current firmware correct
chip four right, that's right. You need at least MMDVM one point six
zero. We recommend one point six dot one just because that's that has the
most up to date stability issue you know, fixes and whatnot. But yes,
cool one point six introduces the most up to date M seventeen support for
sure. Yoh, okay, so Jason. One of the other things you
can do is you can join us for a all star for our nets if
you're around on Friday at seventeen hundred hours. Okay, what's your all star
node number four six five five zero six five zero. There it is okay,
Okay, let meca, I you know what, I didn't know that,
but I had forgotten that, ed, So I'm glad you said that.
And what what time and date were those nets? Again? It's Fridays
at seventeen hundred hours UTC. We just changed the clocks back, so on
the East it's it's one pm. It's yeah, don for for y'all in
central our time? Okay, yeah, okay, what's this stuff? I
definitely wasn't for you guys. Use god, Yeah, that's right, that's
right. A bunch of youths. Oh, that's good. You remember that.
No, that was so funny. We watched that movie just a couple
of month or two ago. That's funny. We were just talking about that
recently. That's so funny. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So uh
well, hey, you guys are been making some real progress here. So
it's impressive all the things that have happened since the last time. We haven't
followed up in a long time, and I appreciate that. Man. I'm
glad I was able to get you guys back on and talked about this stuff
because it's it's definitely moving forward with all the new projects that are coming up
to make this a reality. So one of these days you're just gonna be
able to order a full fledged M seventeen device on online and looking forward to
it all, I'm going to say you just wait, Yeah, it's going
to be pretty incredible. I imagine, I imagine it will. Yeah.
I had an awesome time with the y'all down at the Orlando booth. We
talked a lot about the developer environment and what do they need to get it
spun up, and I was very surprised that N seventeen was using plus plus
and a bunch of the other tools. I was like, I would use
these all all the time. And where where can we if we want to
volunteer our skills at developing and helping you all out, Where can we do
that again? M hm, come to this guy? Discord? Yeah,
Discord. Discord is a great platform for that. We we really could use
contributors, uh, the M seventeen project, w PSD project, even the
sub projects such as the m M DVM sub projects. You know, we
all work together very very very closely, and Discord is a great platform to
you know, get to know the folks involved and get involved. And the
more the merrier, the more the merrier, and we will be out in
Xenia in May. Mm hm. You guys have the booth out there,
Paham mentioned we will be at the Free DV booth. So free dB is
basically doing digital voice on Jeff bands using the same codec. So that's another
project, a bunch of great guys, so it's kind of a two for
one. Come buy our booth and hang out with the free DV guys.
They'll tell you all about the HF side of it, and we'll talk to
you about VHF UHF coin. Good. We will absolutely be in Xenia again
this year, so I always head forward to that show. And your source
code. It's all open source. You have a GitHub repel that I linked
to the chat. Everything is wide open and that is very very very deliberate,
very deliberate. Good. Okay, well, anything else, guys.
I mean, this has been a wealth of information tonight. I appreciate your
time and and all the links that I'm gonna have to go click on and
buy stuff on now. I already bought the Icon radio, so I shared
the Icon Radio on eBay earlier, so I already bought the icon in case
you guys buy that guy. Nice, very nice. But I'm gonna have
to go buy this this seventeen module for my f team six thousand and you
get that right, And there's two different there's a version of that with the
the screen already, Solder just I think it's like six bucks more. Just
do it with the screen already on that. Yeah, yoh yeah, yeah,
I'll get I'll get it with the with the screen for sure. But
cool, okay, excellent, So okay, anything else y'all want to have
another? Really? You know, it's just I just encourage everybody to,
you know, support these these projects, all these open source amateur radio projects,
and there's a lot of them out there, a lot of really great
things out there, and if you know, we get behind them, well
we'll have this hobby lasting for a very long time. And we'll right to
get the youth and the new a Ham's involved in it as well. And
you know, I talk with a good Game all the time about his Teacher's
institute and hopefully we'll get like some of those litlego boards in there once you
know them seventeen firmware is available, so that'll be pretty cool as a production
for the kids. That's right, and so yeah, to build on what
Ed said, you know, you don't have to contribute. Just use it.
It's awesome, it's really awesome. Just use it. It's amazing and
you're not there's no vendor lock in and you can feel good about that.
That's that's a very cool thing. True. True. Okay, okay,
well say yeah once again, thanks for your time tonight, guys. I
appreciate all of the information. We will definitely catch up with you guys at
him mention. But I've actually been talking to Steve on discord for the last
month or two and we've got at least two, i think two other things
that I want to bring you guys back on to live streams for so a
lot of stuff upcoming on that I didn't want to try to cram everything into
one live stream, which is too much info. Sure, but I definitely
want to get these guys back onto the show to talk about all the different
things that seventeen can do. Once this thing comes out, I'll pick up
the new version and that'll be a live stream by itself, to get that
up and running and do some Q so maybe even connect to a hotspot and
do some QSO's with it nice over on a live stream, so that'd be
fun. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. Jason, thanks for having us,
Thanks, thanks Chip, appreciate you and Steve and Ed and all three
of you. You guys hang out for just one minute in the zoom and
I'm going to close this out, but special shout out to all the folks
in green text who join us in the chat. Frank, I saw you
jump in there, KG six, NLW in five SKT I saw you in
there as well, and really appreciate you guys joining us tonight. Put a
comment and not in the live chat now, but put a comment in the
replay video about what other question you have about seventeen, what we could what
we could bring these guys back on for and get them just kind of talking
about all the new stuff that's upcoming and which radios are available and what how
they how to expand the project forward after this. So thanks again, guys,
I appreciate your time tonight. Everyone waving our pleasure to exer and take
care of everybody. Everybody else. Support open source, that's right, Support open source