2024-05-24 — FlexRadio 8000 Series HF Radios - Even More Capable… Except for FreeDV, Connect Systems Versus DVSI, Impressions of the ComJoT CJ-1 Android Portable Radio
I wasn't trying to get a good deal from DVSI. The $2.00 offer was a starting point and should probably be at least the standard royalty price DVSI charges their customers for incorporating their vocoders. Even if I offered $22 per radio they would have rejected it. It was not the per radio royalty charge issue. Their business model requires everyone to pay an up front licensing fee.
Because their patents have expired on the DSTAR vocoder, in theory I can develop a great DSTAR vocoder and not have to pay them a penny in royalty or licensing fees. I don't have the knowledge to even make a poor quality vocoder however I am sure there are people out there who can.
The second issue I had with the article is the use of DSTAR is not good. My objective is to have all the current vocoders available in the radio so all the different modes can eventually be accommodated. The DMR vocoder is used in DMR, Fusion, NXDN, and P25 phase 2. The only vocoder I did not mention is the vocoder used in P25 Phase 1. I am not sure if our hardware will accommodate P25 Phase 1. That vocoder is also patent free because of its age.
The reason for having DSTAR as the fourth protocol is because it is the easiest to implement. It is a "low hanging fruit" argument.
Hi Jerry. I think one factor may be that DSTAR isn't as popular in 7-land as it is in 6-land. Most of the digital ham repeaters up here in 7-land are DMR, which is why I've bought a more than a few radios from you.
Jerry - At some point… “soon”, I think, it’s going to make more sense, overall, to go to a completely Software Defined Radio architecture where everything except the “purely RF” bits like PA, filters, etc. are done with a processor and software. We’re pretty close to that now - see OpenHT - https://m17project.org/news/openht-a-breakthrough-in-ham-radio. The trick is to have a powerful, but power-efficient processor that can do all of the radio functions - waveform creation and decoding, CODEC, etc. all in software. If M17 got that close, then it’s doable with enough funding to hire the good talent. But that’s hard to justify the expenditure given the size and price sensitivity of the Amateur Rsdio market.
The important thing about batteries is how long it will last in the radio not the absolute size. Realize the battery in the AnyTone AT-D878UV is rated at 3.1 Ah. The amateur community for some reason rates the batteries that go into the radio in mAh. This CJ-1 is in amps. So a 3 Ah battery is the same as a 3000 mAh battery.
Yeah, ComJoT also stated their battery size as 3000 mAh, but I just did the conversion in the article as it was easier for me to write 3 Ah. I think that’s a convention from when portable radio batteries were < 1 Ah. I like the “whole body” form factor of the CJ-1’s battery and I would have no trouble with doubling the thickness of that battery with the corresponding doubling of the battery capacity.
Re. the Hamvention, I was there with my Turn Island Systems gadgets as a guest of HamSci and TAPR. My stuff was on the table between the TAPR and HamSci areas, and I spent a lot of time talking with interested hams. Rob Robinett (author of wsprdaemon) and I gave presentations, pretty much the same material we covered at the recent HamSci conference.
I had a blast! This was my first Hamvention, and while I knew it was a big deal, it was way bigger than I had anticipated. I didn't have a chance to see most of it, but I did get to talk with Hans (QRP Labs -- a very busy guy!), and a number of internet friends.
A few outcomes for Turn Island:
* TAPR will be handling sales and distribution for the RX-888 reference clock adaptor kit that I designed on a napkin during the recent HamSci conference, collaborating with a couple of the TAPR folks. I've been selling these from the Turn Island Systems website, but TAPR may take over, or at least become an alternate source.
* One of my WSPRSONDE multi-band transmitters is now on the way to Ellesmere Island (in Canada's far, far, north). I am thrilled by this -- it complements the one now in Antarctica, plus I didn't have to carry my demo unit home on the plane!
* I have several (possibly many) requests for units from the next WSPRSONDE production run.
* There is serious interest in the filters and filter/preamps I have developed for use with wide-band SDR receivers. These optimize, or at least improve, the useful dynamic range of a wideband SDR (as used by the wsprdaemon and other receiving systems).
(FYI, the WSPRSONDE is used in propagation and ionosphere research, and is one of many types of equipment set up by hams, scientists, and ham-scientists.)
This is all small-potatoes stuff, and I'm certainly not going to cut into Icom's market, but it is gratifying to see that there are enough interested hams out there to make what I am doing seem worthwhile.
Paul - Coolness all around and glad you’ve found some common ground with TAPR. There certainly seems to be some synergy with TAPR and HamSci’s collaboration and your products. You might want to consider contributing some of your blog postings for the TAPR PSR - they’re always looking for new material.
My thoughts on DSTAR is that it is probably more popular in Europe than the United States. I have no statistics to back up that thought. Because of Brandmeister and the MMDVM, DSTAR could be used all over the country even without a DSTAR repeater.
If there’s no radio / repeater involved, then D-Star is just another VOIP protocol and easily transcoded from any digital voice protocol to any other digital voice protocol. The one unique aspect of D-Star is its 6.25 kHz bandwidth. No other system has been able to achieve that.
I suggest having an optional add on board with the DVSI chip. Similar to the PL tone boards we had 30 years ago. This way, it will be up to the consumer to decide if they must have D-Star on the radio. BTW, this is what the M17 team are doing with some Icom commercial radios
Alan - Could you elaborate? At a guess, I think you’re saying that there’s no metadata like a group name, or “subject”, or ??? I *think* such a lack could be addressed if the work being done with FreeDATA could be integrated so that such info could be transmitted briefly in s data burst. For example, I could transmit my location (grid square), my radio type, that I’m available for live conversations, etc. in a one second FreeDATA “burst” and then my voice in FreeDV. Being digital, the possibilities are endless, and being software, it’s easily expanded, bugs fixed, etc.
Jerry - Thanks! I wasn't aware of that. Would you consider that NXDN is the commercial version of D-Star given that they were both (commercially) developed by Icom and, like D-Star, jointly supported by Icom and Kenwood? I occasionally encounter mentions of NXDN, but haven't found any Amateur Radio groups that are fans of NXDN like there are with, for example, P25.
DSTAR was developed by an amateur group and made commercially by ICOM. Kenwood might buy DSTAR radios from ICOM and rebrand them. NXDN was a joint venture. ICOM did trademark the word DSTAR. Probably the amateur group that developed the technology used a Japanese word for their technology and ICOM used a word that could work for the countries that used letters. Technically, NXDN is closer to Fusion. DSTAR uses GMRS modulation while NXDN, FUSION, P25 Phase 2 and DMR uses 4FSK modulation.
We are nowhere close to having a UHF radio that could be done completely by software in a standard micro processor.
Even the FLEX radios requires a field programmable gate array to perform some of its functions.
What you might see in the near future is a standard microprocessor with special sub processors to do the functions which cannot be done with the instructions set of the micro processor.
Another question is semantics. If a field program programmable gate array can be dynamically programmed, does that count as a software defined radio?
If it does, then we already have the hardware available to make a completely software defined radio up to at least 70 cm band.
Jerry - We can discuss the practicality of it… but I posit that we’re THERE from a pure technology perspective. The CaribouLite Hat - https://www.crowdsupply.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite-rpi-hat is a SD transceiver that works with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Note that unit is good to 6 GHz… albeit at peanut power levels. What it needs to be a portable radio is power, a display, keyboard and audio I/O. Someone could make that into a portable (big brick) radio. The primary component needed to make this into a “radio” as we know it, other than the integration with power, etc. is SOFTWARE. No one has done it yet, but there are some interesting related attempts like the M17 OpenHT project, and the ComJoT CJ-1 that claims to run any modern Android app, long as the Software-defined aspect is within the addio domain.
We have different definitions of a SDR radio. I only consider it SDR if the A/D converter is used to process the RF at the antenna. Having a LNA at that point is acceptable as it might be difficult to get a low noise A/D converter with a 24 bit accuracy working at the UHF frequency.
Having a mixer to go down to baseband or even IF frequencies then makes it a hybrid.
Android smartphones with ham radio: There has been one model around for quite some time. It was not the price that made me shy away, the ancient Android version was! I will never by a computer of any kind with a operating system that has not been updated for three years or more!
This more or less forces us to a solution like a Meshtastic dongle: Use the smart phone as a user interface and put the ham radio part into your backpack or so.
Alexander - One of the selling points that ComJot makes for the CJ-1 is that it's running a current version of Android. I suspect that if the CJ-1 is actually released, that a fair number of Amateur Radio developers would be interested in developing (or recompiling) apps for the CJ-1.
True that Flex has always been pragmatic about building business cases for what they are doing. Also it is well known they've been spending a lot of time and energy on getting that new Maestro out, along with the big USAF project, so it probably has a lot to do with developer bandwidth. I guess we should be glad to see a refresh of the 6000 line but personally I am not seeing a compelling reason why one would go out of their way to get the 8000 over a used 6000. Hopefully those who feel the need for the latest and greatest will fill the market with used 6000s so more people can enjoy them.
Dave - The primary differentiation (as I understand it) between the FlexRadio 6000 line and the 8000 line is the additional compute power and FPGA size on the latter, which enables new modes... like FreeDV (and data modes - Yay!) to be added using the Waveform API. See the followup discussion on this topic in Zero Retries 0155. Also, the 8000 series units with integral display incorporate the (gorgeous, in my opinion) new display used in the updated Maestro.
Tim - As I tried to explain in the article, one of the prime reasons for incorporating FreeDV as a native mode of FlexRadio units is to differentiate FlexRadio's (truly) software defined radio architecture versus other vendors radios. FlexRadio can add FreeDV as a new mode; Icom, Kenwood, etc. cannot because their architectures are mostly hardware-defined. For a cutting edge HF radio designed in the 21st century, it would be nice, and RELEVANT if it were able to offer a new mode such as FreeDV that was also designed in the 21st century. Also, see the followup on this discussion in Zero Retries 0155.
Re: How I found you: Random googling something presumably about SDR brought up your page, found good stuff so I subscribed. Also you got a recent prominent shout-out from George KJ6VU on the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast so maybe that is helping, but I had already sub'd when I heard that.
Re: Flex 8000: Glad that it has more capabilities but disappointed it isn't more innovative. My big un-answered question: does it boot any faster than the 6000? Also, they seem to be ambiguous about adaptive pre-distortion, is it a day one feature of the 8000 or is it just a "capability" that gets delivered later?
Dave - Thanks for the heads-up about the mention of Zero Retries on the Ham Radio Workbench podcast - that was cool! Good questions about the 8000 series, but I'm not intimately familiar enough with FlexRadio to answer. In my brief reading / viewing of discussions of the 8000 series, I had the impression that the adaptive pre-distortion would be a standard feature of the 8000 series.
I wasn't trying to get a good deal from DVSI. The $2.00 offer was a starting point and should probably be at least the standard royalty price DVSI charges their customers for incorporating their vocoders. Even if I offered $22 per radio they would have rejected it. It was not the per radio royalty charge issue. Their business model requires everyone to pay an up front licensing fee.
Because their patents have expired on the DSTAR vocoder, in theory I can develop a great DSTAR vocoder and not have to pay them a penny in royalty or licensing fees. I don't have the knowledge to even make a poor quality vocoder however I am sure there are people out there who can.
The second issue I had with the article is the use of DSTAR is not good. My objective is to have all the current vocoders available in the radio so all the different modes can eventually be accommodated. The DMR vocoder is used in DMR, Fusion, NXDN, and P25 phase 2. The only vocoder I did not mention is the vocoder used in P25 Phase 1. I am not sure if our hardware will accommodate P25 Phase 1. That vocoder is also patent free because of its age.
The reason for having DSTAR as the fourth protocol is because it is the easiest to implement. It is a "low hanging fruit" argument.
Hi Jerry. I think one factor may be that DSTAR isn't as popular in 7-land as it is in 6-land. Most of the digital ham repeaters up here in 7-land are DMR, which is why I've bought a more than a few radios from you.
Jerry - At some point… “soon”, I think, it’s going to make more sense, overall, to go to a completely Software Defined Radio architecture where everything except the “purely RF” bits like PA, filters, etc. are done with a processor and software. We’re pretty close to that now - see OpenHT - https://m17project.org/news/openht-a-breakthrough-in-ham-radio. The trick is to have a powerful, but power-efficient processor that can do all of the radio functions - waveform creation and decoding, CODEC, etc. all in software. If M17 got that close, then it’s doable with enough funding to hire the good talent. But that’s hard to justify the expenditure given the size and price sensitivity of the Amateur Rsdio market.
The important thing about batteries is how long it will last in the radio not the absolute size. Realize the battery in the AnyTone AT-D878UV is rated at 3.1 Ah. The amateur community for some reason rates the batteries that go into the radio in mAh. This CJ-1 is in amps. So a 3 Ah battery is the same as a 3000 mAh battery.
Yeah, ComJoT also stated their battery size as 3000 mAh, but I just did the conversion in the article as it was easier for me to write 3 Ah. I think that’s a convention from when portable radio batteries were < 1 Ah. I like the “whole body” form factor of the CJ-1’s battery and I would have no trouble with doubling the thickness of that battery with the corresponding doubling of the battery capacity.
Re. the Hamvention, I was there with my Turn Island Systems gadgets as a guest of HamSci and TAPR. My stuff was on the table between the TAPR and HamSci areas, and I spent a lot of time talking with interested hams. Rob Robinett (author of wsprdaemon) and I gave presentations, pretty much the same material we covered at the recent HamSci conference.
I had a blast! This was my first Hamvention, and while I knew it was a big deal, it was way bigger than I had anticipated. I didn't have a chance to see most of it, but I did get to talk with Hans (QRP Labs -- a very busy guy!), and a number of internet friends.
A few outcomes for Turn Island:
* TAPR will be handling sales and distribution for the RX-888 reference clock adaptor kit that I designed on a napkin during the recent HamSci conference, collaborating with a couple of the TAPR folks. I've been selling these from the Turn Island Systems website, but TAPR may take over, or at least become an alternate source.
* One of my WSPRSONDE multi-band transmitters is now on the way to Ellesmere Island (in Canada's far, far, north). I am thrilled by this -- it complements the one now in Antarctica, plus I didn't have to carry my demo unit home on the plane!
* I have several (possibly many) requests for units from the next WSPRSONDE production run.
* There is serious interest in the filters and filter/preamps I have developed for use with wide-band SDR receivers. These optimize, or at least improve, the useful dynamic range of a wideband SDR (as used by the wsprdaemon and other receiving systems).
(FYI, the WSPRSONDE is used in propagation and ionosphere research, and is one of many types of equipment set up by hams, scientists, and ham-scientists.)
This is all small-potatoes stuff, and I'm certainly not going to cut into Icom's market, but it is gratifying to see that there are enough interested hams out there to make what I am doing seem worthwhile.
Paul - Coolness all around and glad you’ve found some common ground with TAPR. There certainly seems to be some synergy with TAPR and HamSci’s collaboration and your products. You might want to consider contributing some of your blog postings for the TAPR PSR - they’re always looking for new material.
Yes, I have already promised to contribute to the PSR. We've been discussing collaboration for several months now, and I'm looking forward to it.
My thoughts on DSTAR is that it is probably more popular in Europe than the United States. I have no statistics to back up that thought. Because of Brandmeister and the MMDVM, DSTAR could be used all over the country even without a DSTAR repeater.
If there’s no radio / repeater involved, then D-Star is just another VOIP protocol and easily transcoded from any digital voice protocol to any other digital voice protocol. The one unique aspect of D-Star is its 6.25 kHz bandwidth. No other system has been able to achieve that.
I suggest having an optional add on board with the DVSI chip. Similar to the PL tone boards we had 30 years ago. This way, it will be up to the consumer to decide if they must have D-Star on the radio. BTW, this is what the M17 team are doing with some Icom commercial radios
Yoram - That’s a good idea, but space (and engineering) of such an option is pretty precious in a portable radio.
FreeDV lacks one VERY important feature. Though a callsign can be sent in the protocol,
there is no "Talk Group" or anything an intelligent receiving system can do something with.
Alan - Could you elaborate? At a guess, I think you’re saying that there’s no metadata like a group name, or “subject”, or ??? I *think* such a lack could be addressed if the work being done with FreeDATA could be integrated so that such info could be transmitted briefly in s data burst. For example, I could transmit my location (grid square), my radio type, that I’m available for live conversations, etc. in a one second FreeDATA “burst” and then my voice in FreeDV. Being digital, the possibilities are endless, and being software, it’s easily expanded, bugs fixed, etc.
NXDN is 6.25 KHz per channel. There is an option to double that.
Jerry - Thanks! I wasn't aware of that. Would you consider that NXDN is the commercial version of D-Star given that they were both (commercially) developed by Icom and, like D-Star, jointly supported by Icom and Kenwood? I occasionally encounter mentions of NXDN, but haven't found any Amateur Radio groups that are fans of NXDN like there are with, for example, P25.
DSTAR was developed by an amateur group and made commercially by ICOM. Kenwood might buy DSTAR radios from ICOM and rebrand them. NXDN was a joint venture. ICOM did trademark the word DSTAR. Probably the amateur group that developed the technology used a Japanese word for their technology and ICOM used a word that could work for the countries that used letters. Technically, NXDN is closer to Fusion. DSTAR uses GMRS modulation while NXDN, FUSION, P25 Phase 2 and DMR uses 4FSK modulation.
We are nowhere close to having a UHF radio that could be done completely by software in a standard micro processor.
Even the FLEX radios requires a field programmable gate array to perform some of its functions.
What you might see in the near future is a standard microprocessor with special sub processors to do the functions which cannot be done with the instructions set of the micro processor.
Another question is semantics. If a field program programmable gate array can be dynamically programmed, does that count as a software defined radio?
If it does, then we already have the hardware available to make a completely software defined radio up to at least 70 cm band.
Jerry - We can discuss the practicality of it… but I posit that we’re THERE from a pure technology perspective. The CaribouLite Hat - https://www.crowdsupply.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite-rpi-hat is a SD transceiver that works with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Note that unit is good to 6 GHz… albeit at peanut power levels. What it needs to be a portable radio is power, a display, keyboard and audio I/O. Someone could make that into a portable (big brick) radio. The primary component needed to make this into a “radio” as we know it, other than the integration with power, etc. is SOFTWARE. No one has done it yet, but there are some interesting related attempts like the M17 OpenHT project, and the ComJoT CJ-1 that claims to run any modern Android app, long as the Software-defined aspect is within the addio domain.
We have different definitions of a SDR radio. I only consider it SDR if the A/D converter is used to process the RF at the antenna. Having a LNA at that point is acceptable as it might be difficult to get a low noise A/D converter with a 24 bit accuracy working at the UHF frequency.
Having a mixer to go down to baseband or even IF frequencies then makes it a hybrid.
Android smartphones with ham radio: There has been one model around for quite some time. It was not the price that made me shy away, the ancient Android version was! I will never by a computer of any kind with a operating system that has not been updated for three years or more!
This more or less forces us to a solution like a Meshtastic dongle: Use the smart phone as a user interface and put the ham radio part into your backpack or so.
Alexander - One of the selling points that ComJot makes for the CJ-1 is that it's running a current version of Android. I suspect that if the CJ-1 is actually released, that a fair number of Amateur Radio developers would be interested in developing (or recompiling) apps for the CJ-1.
Hi Steve,
I have communicated with the now, US developers and the sticking point
has been the US FCC regulations (No repeaters on HF under 28MHz).
Thus the developer team would NOT consider the rest of the world!
In the original 700D mode, there is Free Text that is transmitted
alongside the voice. You could say this is "meta-data".
And, an intelligent Reverse Beacon "freebeacon" was developed
alongside the first FreeDV app. It looked for a trigger string, once spotted,
would retransmit in 700D a voice message and in it's text,
the Bit Error stats of the received signal.
This "free text" was terribly unreliable so the US developer
concentrated on the FreeDV app being able to pass on
information about received callsigns and them to post them
on the QSO.freedv.org website. Thus he applied FEC and
reduced the text character set to get callsigns across
reliably. Called "Reliable Text" in the source-code.
(And not breaking the protocol for older FreeDV apps.)
Remember, at 700 bits/sec, bits are "expensive".
(We want at least 98% of them for the voice.)
And, to accomodate long callsigns, nine or ten
characters are in the "Reliable Text" data. Nothing spare.
and, "/" is not in the character set so "VK2ZIW/P" is not
possible. (nor even allowed to be put in the Callsign field
in the FreeDV app.) (.,+ and - are in the character set
but one can't put them in the Callsign field)
BTW: I do like the "Reliable Text" idea.
Thanks for recognising, "meta-data" allows intelligent
receiving systems to make decisions and opens up a whole
world of networking possibilities.
Thanks for your Zero Retries blog, It's very useful keeping us
up with current developments.
0x73
Alan VK2ZIW
Alan - Thanks for the followup on metadata in FreeDV and your kind words about Zero Retries.
Re: FreeDV-free FLEX Radios
I can think of billions of reasons that endless fountains of open-source projects are not passionately embraced by <insert company name here>.
Here’s the first one: the concept of a profitable value proposition. Businesses are in business to make more money.
So, compared to all the other ways that FLEX radio could be making more money, where do you think FreeDV should rank and why?
True that Flex has always been pragmatic about building business cases for what they are doing. Also it is well known they've been spending a lot of time and energy on getting that new Maestro out, along with the big USAF project, so it probably has a lot to do with developer bandwidth. I guess we should be glad to see a refresh of the 6000 line but personally I am not seeing a compelling reason why one would go out of their way to get the 8000 over a used 6000. Hopefully those who feel the need for the latest and greatest will fill the market with used 6000s so more people can enjoy them.
Dave - The primary differentiation (as I understand it) between the FlexRadio 6000 line and the 8000 line is the additional compute power and FPGA size on the latter, which enables new modes... like FreeDV (and data modes - Yay!) to be added using the Waveform API. See the followup discussion on this topic in Zero Retries 0155. Also, the 8000 series units with integral display incorporate the (gorgeous, in my opinion) new display used in the updated Maestro.
Tim - As I tried to explain in the article, one of the prime reasons for incorporating FreeDV as a native mode of FlexRadio units is to differentiate FlexRadio's (truly) software defined radio architecture versus other vendors radios. FlexRadio can add FreeDV as a new mode; Icom, Kenwood, etc. cannot because their architectures are mostly hardware-defined. For a cutting edge HF radio designed in the 21st century, it would be nice, and RELEVANT if it were able to offer a new mode such as FreeDV that was also designed in the 21st century. Also, see the followup on this discussion in Zero Retries 0155.
Hi Steve - The API is super good news for FreeDV and radio hacking in general. Flex can focus resources on future R&D that way instead of FreeDV.
Re: How I found you: Random googling something presumably about SDR brought up your page, found good stuff so I subscribed. Also you got a recent prominent shout-out from George KJ6VU on the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast so maybe that is helping, but I had already sub'd when I heard that.
Re: Flex 8000: Glad that it has more capabilities but disappointed it isn't more innovative. My big un-answered question: does it boot any faster than the 6000? Also, they seem to be ambiguous about adaptive pre-distortion, is it a day one feature of the 8000 or is it just a "capability" that gets delivered later?
Dave - Thanks for the heads-up about the mention of Zero Retries on the Ham Radio Workbench podcast - that was cool! Good questions about the 8000 series, but I'm not intimately familiar enough with FlexRadio to answer. In my brief reading / viewing of discussions of the 8000 series, I had the impression that the adaptive pre-distortion would be a standard feature of the 8000 series.