Introducing SmartMic Ham Radio Digital Voice

Introducing SmartMic Ham Radio Digital Voice

David Rowe VK5DGR and Rick Barnich KA8BMA have been working on SmartMic, an embedded hardware product that allows you to run FreeDV without a PC. Just plug it into your SSB or FM radio, and you now have Digital Voice (DV)

The whole design is open hardware (TAPR license). It will run an embedded version of FreeDV which is also 100% open source.

Based on a STM32F4 micro-controller, SmartMic has a built in microphone, speaker amplifier, and transformer isolated interfaces to your radio. It’s just 80 x 100mm, and can be held in you hand and used like a regular PTT microphone, or sit near your radio in a small box form factor. SmartMic will be in production later in 2014 and will retail for US$195.

Read about SmartMic at
http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?p=3125

Codec 2 http://www.rowetel.com/blog/?page_id=452

FreeDV: Digital Voice for HF
http://freedv.org/tiki-index.php

Join the FreeDV Codec2 email list at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freetel-codec2





http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2014/may/introducing_smartmic_ham_radio_digital_voice.htm



Follow Southgate News on Twitter
Become a Facebook fan

 

That's GREAT!

 

That is great, but looks like the news is in its infancy still. Excited for the platform to be released and mature a little. I am concerned about adopting it day one as I have a feeling it will mature quickly in a 2.0

 

You can go the software route too, so no hardware investment there. Then, you can wait until "maturity" to dive into hardware.

 

This great news. We have to get some type of standard in place for radio interoperability in digital. It is really frustrating that the major manufacturers are staying with incompatible solutions. Maybe there is light at the end of the digital tunnel.

 

While you could "plug it in" to an FM radio, this is highly deprecated using the current Frequency Division Multiplex (FDM) waveform. This waveform allows 1600 bits/sec in about 1.3 kHz of bandwidth. Very spectrum efficient. A real advantage on SSB.

Plugging this into FM will take the 1.3 kHz and blow it out to your FM channel width, and doesn't offer any advantages over analog FM.

Like any continuous duty waveform, you will need to use a much lower power than you're used to on analog. The narrow bandwidth, and error correction provide a good trade-off.

73, Steve