A Business Idea For FRS???

Roy Laufer

I was playing around with my lovely 6700 on a DStar Repeater and a thought came to me...

Wireless Holdings LLC is hard at work trying to birth an all in one Digital Voice mode radio, the fabled DV4mobile, which is described as an SDR radio, that they intend to sell for $900-$1200.

...and I was thinking that FRS whipped up a waveform for DStar... what about DMR and Fusion?

Yes, I know that DMR's TDMA doesn't play well with power modules that are not designed for them specifically.

Yes, I know that the waveform software is available to ALL developers with significant programming training and a significant amount of time and devotion.

I'm just thinking that if Wireless Holdings is planning to get $1K on something like that, FRS could surely leverage the power and the awe that is the 6700 Series to at least be able to receive all three major voice digital modes...

Just thinking....

There might be some money to be made?

Whatcha think???

Vy 73,
Roy AC2GS

KENT HUFFORD

I think the DSTAR waveform CODEC is in the ThumbDV USB stick you have to add to the 6xxx radio. FUSION is owned by YAESU. DSTAR is a product of the JARL, the Japanese "ARRL".

Roy Laufer

I beg to differ.

The ThumDV USB is merely an AMBE Vocoder chip that can be used to decode ALL commercial digital voice modes.

The primary difference between each different proprietary system is not the vocoder. It is the method of encoding the fiddly digital bits. One uses TDMA, another C4FM - modulation technology doesn't seem to be very patentable, or these guys would have to pay someone else for their own implementation.

It's just a matter of writing the mod-demod processing and linking it to a PC window that can process DMR ID, talkgroups, etc.

The only locked down private intellectual property is in that AMBE chip sitting on my ThumbDV USB stick.

The rest is a matter of skillfull programming (until you get to TDMA transmitting, which would be problematic).