Hi, I’m Bruce Perens K6BP. It’s Hamvention 2023, and HamOpen.org continues to sponsor worthy Open Source Amateur Radio projects to exhibit in our booth. We have the M17 Project and FreeDV with us.
I am very pleased to host these two groups, as they grew out of the Codec2 project to develop an Open Source digital voice codec for Amateur Radio, which I evangelized because I was concerned that hams were using the proprietary AMBE codec. But I didn’t have the chops to write a new CODEC, much as I wanted one. Jean-Marc Valin (Speex author) introduced David Rowe VK5DGR, an Australian ham with a Ph.D. in digital voice coding. David had a codec from his 20-year-old Ph.D. thesis sitting on the shelf, and took on the project. He has made incredible progress since.
I wish I had as much progress to show for my $14 Remote Rig Controller. My latest work on this has been to hack the ESP32 Flashing Software to support configuring the device’s WiFi from the console. Unfortunately I had a heart attack and double bypass surgery in November, a flood of my hamshack and workshop this winter, and have had to concentrate on my main business, and thus I am delayed on this project. Fortunately I am entirely recovered from the heart attack (actually I have never been able to exercise as easily as I can now) and am making progress in reassembling the hamshack.
At the show, I have been speaking with ARDC about funding some future projects. ARDC has money to grant because they held IP version 4 addresses for Amateur Radio, and sold 1/4 of that IP block to Amazon for about $134 Million. Fortunately, ARDC has lots of IP version 4 addresses left for hams, and so many IPV6 addresses that we could give one to every person in the world. They are good folks and have supported many important projects.