M17

The M17 Project: “M17 is a new digital radio protocol in development as an alternative to those currently available, with freedom in mind. Freedom in the code, protocol, voice codecs, and hardware. The goal is to provide a better option for digital radios in the future.”

I’m all-in on M17, and one of the core software developers.

My biggest contributions to date are the PyM17 (pypi M17) and libM17 projects, and working with SP5WWP and N7TAE to hammer out the details of IP framing.

Part of the PyM17 work includes a reference design for IP framing, a full UDP voice client, a simple (sans linking) reflector, an M17 to Echolink bridge, an icecast server for testing M17 streams, and more.

The Python serves as an experimentation testbed: I’m currently playing with peer to peer networking as applied to M17 callsign routing and M17 reflectors.

Along the line I also built a small M17 address calculator demo webapp.

I’ve also got the most focus on the codeplug format and have some tools related to that in the works. Look for an future post on that.