VMW M&A
It’s 2023, Oct 2nd.
VMware is getting acquired by Broadcom. VMW is my day job.
I don’t yet know what that means for me, but I’ll know in about a month.
It’s 2023, Oct 2nd.
VMware is getting acquired by Broadcom. VMW is my day job.
I don’t yet know what that means for me, but I’ll know in about a month.
Pi-Star is an excellent hotspot firmware image that has brought multi mode hotspots to the amateur masses.
It could be improved in several areas, as it does not use many of the tools that make managing Linux systems easier.
Unfortunately, I don’t want to work on it directly.
M17 is an open source land mobile radio digital voice and data protocol, and the M17 Project is a worldwide community implementing that protocol.
M17 is fully open including the voice codec. Competitor protocols have proprietary codecs, which limits their hackability and your freedoms.
This is M17. Experiment, innovate, learn, build and fix at your own will.
Benefit from others doing the same thing. Repeat!
Hi everyone! I made and maintain https://dmr.tools/ and would like your feedback on it, especially if you’ve been using it over the years, and your stars on the github source
Chip posted this the other day titled “Open Letter to MMDVM Board/Hotspot Vendors”.
I don’t have much to add. I’ve been bitten by this too. Many hotspot vendors are skimping on quality or other various aspects, or otherwise sell you something that is artificially limited.
I figured I’d link his post for what little extra attention it might gain his message, and mention a couple sellers that are good while I’m at it.
In land mobile radio, it can be handy to have a legible shorthand for describing a channel. Over time we’ve seen one evolve, that I’ve formalized a bit to implement in dmr.tools.
Yaesu’s FTM-300 mobile VHF/UHF radio has a bug related to decoding digital data from the data port in the back.
Delete your social media.
You are being emotionally and intellectually poisoned against your will and largely outside your ken.
I discovered the hard way that the cable for Hytera PD362s from BlueMax49ers was not correctly made on multiple levels. (Written early June 2023)
The FCS-152 is a visual clone of the PRC-152 that offers FM analog VHF/UHF voice communications.
Happy Valentine’s day! I didn’t get you anything.
If you play the flight simulator DCS World and happen to have a bass shaker or buttkicker handy, …
This is meant to be a series of short and sweet guide to a few ways to run M17 over RF today. This one focuses on transmitting and receiving M17 with m17-cxx-demod and GnuRadio. This’ll require a little more Linux familiarity than the OpenWebRX guide, but it’s not too bad.
I’d say the hardest part is making sure you have the right dependencies installed - on some linux systems it can be a real bear. If you run into any troubles, make sure to ask for help and we’ll try to sort it out and get it documented.
What’s new?
This is meant to be a series of short and sweet guide to a few ways to run M17 over RF today. This one focuses on receiving M17 with OpenWebRX.
I’ve broken ground on the backend server for DMR.Tools and ProgramRadios.com.
I got firmware updates through WebUSB working for 1st and 2nd gen TYT radios last night.
2020 has been a hard year. With family medical issues, a dying (and now passed) dog, the end of 2020 was particularly rough.
There’s one bright point - I soft launched DMR.Tools, specifically to help my first user.
Some new updates for ProgramRadios/DMRTools involving encryption keys.
Open Research Institute (ORI) has sponsored us (M17)!
Check us out on their projects page, and keep reading to see why this is good for M17.
I’ve added mrefd reflector support to pyM17, so now you can talk to existing M17-REF reflectors using Python.
Code and details after the break.
A reflector for a mode like M17 is something like a chat server - it has rooms or channels, called “modules”, and whoever talks in one channel gets broadcast out to all other nodes in that same channel.
These channels can also be linked with channels on other reflectors, which allows for creating vast networks of audio conferences for linking ham radio clients together around the world.
I’ve never actually used a reflector like mrefd, but someone on IRC reported constant “connect” messages being printed to the screen attempting to link to M17-POL, but no packets being sent.
One of the beta testers for my FCC itinerant business radio licensing guide pointed out that the equivalent license through BuyTwoWayRadios would have cost $1600.
Holy smokes.
M17 (the project) have designed a radio called the TR-9 that speaks M17 (the protocol).
Only SP5WWP has built one so far, and he’s getting all the fun software development so I have to catch up and build one too so he can’t hog the fun parts.
I’ve been videoing the build process (Youtube).
I spent a bunch of time on the ProgramRadios and DMR Tools source today.
These are web based radio programming tools for DMR radios - there are no competitors, and I have a pretty slick programming paradigm that hasn’t been seen before - makes it a lot easier to create, manage, and update large complicated codeplugs. They’re also nearly ready for beta testers, so get on my mailing list if you’re interested.
Biggest improvements:
I’ve just created a site to list places and people with test equipment that they’re willing to allow other ham radio operators to use.
The idea is to support radio homebrewers by making good quality test equipment more available, and possibly restart the elmering community.
It’s at https://rflabs.tarxvf.tech/ but keep reading to understand the motivation behind its creation.