Re:Show HN: A new protocol for packet radio including ECDSA ...
by giancarlostoro on Monday September 24, 2018 @12:11PM
(#18058886)
Been wondering why some of the radios cost way too much and now I am left wondering how much cheaper they would be if those patented codecs were banned or forced to be open for implementation.
Re:Show HN: A new protocol for packet radio including ECDSA ...
by tjohns on Monday September 24, 2018 @01:42PM
(#18059682)
The AMBE-3000 vocoder chip (used for pretty much all of the digital modes, including D-STAR and DMR) retails for about $50, before volume discount.
Which is not a small mount of money, but isn't that bad given that most amateur radios (excluding the recent Chinese models) retail for ~$500, and commercial radios retail for $1,000+.
That said, I'm pretty sure everyone would prefer to move to Codec2, but the lack of hardware offerings is a problem. I'm looking forward to the day the first real SDR handheld transceiver comes out so this can be implemented by the open source radio community. It's clear that none of the radio manufacturers are interested in interoperability, much less adopting community standards.
At least with a proprietary codec with that patent restriction anyone can still go out and buy a compatible radio and jump right on. And if the improvement to capabilities is large enough the trade off is worth it. It's not ideal but it's much better than allowing encryption where the transmissions aren't accessible to anyone by design.