[d-star] SDR Dominates the 2010 ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference

[Mark Thompson]

SDR Dominates the 2010 ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference09/27/2010 
By Ward Silver, N0AX

www.arrl.org/news/sdr-dominates-the-2010-arrl-tapr-digital-communications-conference


The turnout was excellent for the ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conference 
September 23-26 at the Heathman Lodge in Vancouver, Washington.

The three day conference included technical presentations on both  Friday and 
Saturday, and an optional tutorial seminar on Sunday morning.  Both Yaesu and 
ICOM attended as commercial vendors. Although not  present at the conference, 
Kenwood contributed door prizes.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) was the dominant technical theme of the  
conference. Along with independent SDR developers, the Open SDR group  gave a 
status update, George Heron, N2APB, introduced the SDR Cube www.sdr-cube.com/ 
project and the conference even featured an “introduction to SDR”  forum. 
Another discussion that attracted a great deal of attention was a  project to 
adapt analog radios to SDR at the IF.

Other conference highlights included a presentation by Rick Muething, KN6KB, on 
the status of WINMOR, www.winlink.org/WINMOR the sound-card-based HF digital 
protocol recently incorporated into Winlink’s RMS Express software package. 
WINMOR promises performance that rivals PACTOR III at  a tiny fraction of the 
cost. Rick also discussed development of this  new V4 protocol for 
keyboard-to-keyboard communication and was at the  podium again Sunday morning 
with his DSP tutorial.

One of the most anticipated talks was given by Bruce Perens, K6BP, on  the new 
Codec2 digital voice codec. This is an open source project that  makes 
significant advances beyond the AMBE vocoder family without any of the licensing 
and patent issues that have  hindered development of Amateur Radio digital voice 
systems. Bruce  stated that by this time next year, the codec should be ready 
for  late-beta deployment on the HF bands.

The complete list of presenters and topics is available at the TAPR Web 
sitewww.tapr.org   


	*  Rick Muething, KN... 
	*  Mel Whitten, K0PF... 
	*  N2ADR’s “All Di
All photos by N0AX