2025-10-25 — What’s New at DLARC - 2025-10, The (Amateur Radio) World Has Changed For Me, Followup on How to Get (Re) Started in Data Comm, FreeDV’s Baseband FM (BBFM) Technology, DIgiPi 2.0
Re: Exponentially Improving Radio Technology in Ukraine
I remember watching that video, but for the life of me I can't find it now. Here's another one that digs deep in to reverse engineering Russian hardware and at times, repurposing it.
Electronic Warfare: Ukraine's Secret Weapon Against Russian Missiles
Joe - Glad I'm not the only one that loses track of stuff like that. I'm trying to get better about reflexively bookmarking everything Zero Retries Interesting, but sometimes I just get enthralled with the content and learning something new, and forget.
"I love the implementation of TDMA (4 time slots) and the specific support for data as well as digital voice. Presumably if the time slots aren’t being used by voice, they could be used for data at the maximum rate of 50 kbps"
Let's hope this does better than ISDN did in replacing POTS.
Uncle - That's the beauty of (Amateur) Radio - virtually no infrastructure to replace except the two or more participants in the experiment. I was about to say "Radio", but then remembered that there's a lot of infrastructure outside Amateur Radio, like the mass of P25 / TETRA / DMR / NXDN that can only be very painfully, expensively, slowly upgraded.
Indeed, the VR-N76 and its sibling radios are breaking open portable packet radio by pairing natively with iPhones and iPads and exposing its internal TNC. If you want to explore modern BBS networks on the go, consider trying Packet Commander (https://packetcommander.com), an iOS terminal and packet monitor built for exactly this.
Bob - Point taken. Some of the earlier reviews I read about making use of internal TNCs weren't that glowing - tiny buffers, fussy Bluetooth, etc. But per KU0HN, the VR-N76 seems to have overcome those issues. I second your recommendation of Packet Commander - it seems like a great app from an experienced author.
For those interested in the GNU Radio Discord and Matrix servers, information can be found on their Wiki at https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/Chat
Time for me to create a Matrix account! :-)
Dj - Thanks for that!
Re: Exponentially Improving Radio Technology in Ukraine
I remember watching that video, but for the life of me I can't find it now. Here's another one that digs deep in to reverse engineering Russian hardware and at times, repurposing it.
Electronic Warfare: Ukraine's Secret Weapon Against Russian Missiles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaTIwpm1QcE
-Joe w7com
Joe - Glad I'm not the only one that loses track of stuff like that. I'm trying to get better about reflexively bookmarking everything Zero Retries Interesting, but sometimes I just get enthralled with the content and learning something new, and forget.
"I love the implementation of TDMA (4 time slots) and the specific support for data as well as digital voice. Presumably if the time slots aren’t being used by voice, they could be used for data at the maximum rate of 50 kbps"
Let's hope this does better than ISDN did in replacing POTS.
Uncle - That's the beauty of (Amateur) Radio - virtually no infrastructure to replace except the two or more participants in the experiment. I was about to say "Radio", but then remembered that there's a lot of infrastructure outside Amateur Radio, like the mass of P25 / TETRA / DMR / NXDN that can only be very painfully, expensively, slowly upgraded.
Indeed, the VR-N76 and its sibling radios are breaking open portable packet radio by pairing natively with iPhones and iPads and exposing its internal TNC. If you want to explore modern BBS networks on the go, consider trying Packet Commander (https://packetcommander.com), an iOS terminal and packet monitor built for exactly this.
Bob - Point taken. Some of the earlier reviews I read about making use of internal TNCs weren't that glowing - tiny buffers, fussy Bluetooth, etc. But per KU0HN, the VR-N76 seems to have overcome those issues. I second your recommendation of Packet Commander - it seems like a great app from an experienced author.