Agree…it’s sough to argue against that. However, it’s a big hill to climb as tons of HTs have something proprietary built in, and I don’t think anything has M17 available?
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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OpenRTX brings M17 to a few radios. I haven't tried it myself (digital VHF doesn't interest me) but it looks inexpensive to get into.
I'm not worried about proprietary modes on the ham bands because they cannot compete as software slowly becomes more integral to radio. There are two commonly held values that I think explain what we're seeing with digital radio today, and what the inevitable outcome will be.
Hams have money but are frugal with how we spend it. We tend to seek the highest possible value for the lowest possible price. If it's something simple, we tend to spend only a little money. If the thing is packed full of features, then $1000 will quickly disappear. A wire antenna? DIY or, at most, only buy a choke/transformer. That shiny IC-7300? Already ordered with delivery tomorrow.
Hams tend to be hackers. Proprietary is not a barrier, sometimes a fascination itself, so long as the proprietary thing can be hacked into something entertaining, useful, weird, or just for fun.
These two values, frugality and hacking, are acting together to make modes like VARA popular. These values are also why VARA and other proprietary modes are doomed.
VARA is cheap when compared to a popular competitor: PACTOR. Would you pay $1,300 or $70 for roughly the same set of features? VARA's pricing model leans into this price advantage with a free tier clearly meant to target the frugality of hams. Try VARA out and, if you like it, then $70 is cheap enough to close the sale. VARA is also a soundmodem that runs on generic computer hardware. Your average ham can download VARA today and have it running in minutes on components they already have. VARA is a solid value proposition for hacking a digital HF station together.
But, in time, an open source modem will arise. VARA will lose popularity when it inevitably competes against a free, as in beer, and free, as in freedom, tool. Selling a software modem is a losing battle against a similar software modem that costs nothing and runs on anything, operating system be damned. VARA will never run on some esoteric microcontroller, which we all know must happen ASAP. Who can say no to a Winlink toaster?
I expect digital VHF/UHF radio to follow a similar path as commercial portable radios replace hardware with software. What may be a voice codec as a chip (hardware like PACTOR) will become some DSP firmware (soundmodem like VARA). The frugal and hacker values will push VHF/UHF further into freedom; M17 and OpenRTX being a great example.