March 31, 2023

HRN 471: Appliance Boy Meets M17

March 31, 2023/ Gary Pearce

M17 is the new kid on the VHF/UHF Digital Voice block. You’re not going to be picking up a new M17 radio at HRO anytime soon – it’s decidedly experimental at this point. But it’s not vaporware, either. In this episode, HRN host Gary K4AAQ talks… at length… with Ed Wilson N2XDD and Steve Miller KC1AWV about what M17 is, how you can get into it, and what the future might be.

At length? Well, that was a challenge. Ed mentioned that the longest show they did – and they’ve done almost all the other shows – was three hours (turns out the YouTube length for that show was only 2:46). So we had to beat it, and we did.

We didn’t do an official promo for this show, but Gary did spend some time on the feed… as one ham noted… taking an hour to describe a 10-minute troubleshooting episode.

This was an off-schedule Friday night show for us. David W0DHG was on his way to his stage in the Baker to Vegas run, and Jim NO1PC had family-time. We will be back together soon (but not too soon - Gary has a ski trip next week).

Down below you’ll see links to Michelle Thompson’s Blog about M17 and ARDC. Toward the end of the show (which turns out to be long before the end of the show), Gary brings up a controversy that Michelle told him about, concerning funding for M17, her Open Research Institute, and ARDC. Read the blog post, and watch the show at that point for the details. We’ll cover other points of view about that in future shows.

LINKS:

March 19, 2023

HRN 470: The David(less) and Gary Show

March 19, 2023/ Gary Pearce

No Preshow babble. Zip in to 12:10 and we… er, Gary… gets started. (No ProMore either)

It was going to be The David and Gary Show because we didn’t have prep, so we didn’t have a topic or theme (not that all of the shows actually stick to a topic or theme). And just before showtime, somebody smacked into a power pole down the block from the West Coast Studio, and David was left in the dark. And that’s the last we’ve heard from him (at least as I’m typing this).

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But the show must go on, so Gary (me) managed to vamp for about 45 minutes before wrapping things up and sending everyone to Ria’s Ham Shack to brush up on getting their General license.

Oh, and I figured out how to invite people to our Discord: https://discord.gg/wZNBfEmB (link expires on March 26, so hurry).

March 15, 2023

HRN Special: Digital Voice 2023 (VHF/UHF Edition)

March 15, 2023/ Gary Pearce

The 90 minute version

East Coast Host Gary K4AAQ presented a forum on Digital Voice for VHF/UHF 2023 at the Charlotte Hamfest in March. Gary ‘inherited’ the forum from Roland Kraatz W9HPX, who became a Silent Key the previous December. Gary put in too many hours making ‘too many PowerPoint slides’ to just do a one-hour forum, so he recorded this Special Edition for HamRadioNow.

The 15 minute version

This version clocks in at about 90 minutes. Gary had to cut a lot of the slides he worked so hard to create to bring his talk down to an hour, so he put some of them back in for this version. Then, just for those of you with limited time, he took a digital axe to the whole thing and chopped it down to 15 minutes. It isn’t pretty, but the essential elements are there. Maybe.

The Original Documentary

We’re also presenting Gary’s original 2008 documentary Digital Voice for Amateur Radio, which includes his investigation of D-STAR and P-25, and the original DV mode for HF. Somehow all that is squeezed into less time than his slide show.

Audio podcast listeners are being treated only to the 90 minute slide show. If you want to see the truncated version, or the documentary, here’s the link to the web site: https://www.hamradionow.tv/episodes/2023/3/15/hrn-special-digital-voice-2023-vhfuhf-edition

Episodes