Every few months, the various D-STAR forums have someone come on and say that AMBE was a bad choice for D-STAR and that it should be replaced by CODEC2 or some other open source CODEC. Side note: AMBE is not a codec, its a vocoder.
Here is my latest response.
I don’t think anyone is saying that AMBE/D-STAR is the only way to do digital voice on Amateur Radio.
I think what people that do the work, understand the system, and have been at this for awhile get tired of are just a few key points:
- Beating up D-STAR over the use of AMBE
- It’s just a part, like a microprocessor, DSP, etc.
- It is the best commercially available, off the shelf, component to provide digital human voice over the radio
- It’s price is reasonable (how it is packaged by some vendors for sale is pretty high for their BOM)
- It is used in other Amateur Radio products (AOR ARD digital voice, Alinco digital voice, NXDN, MotoTRBO, next generation P25) without the same vitriol.
- People saying we can just modify D-STAR to use Codec-2 or some other Codec
- Those of us who work with interoperability and implementation standards understand the issues with making non-standard changes to a protocol.
- Standards are controlled through a process (that the JARL doesn’t execute well), which is where changes should be vetted, voted, and documented.
- We shouldn’t confuse consumers of a protocol by implementing something different and give it the same (or very similar) name.
- Introduction of incompatible systems into a working and established network or protocol framework creates unneeded issues.
- People taking a narrow view of what the protocol means
- If you only look at Digital Voice you are leaving out much of the D-STAR protocol
- Not considering side effects
- Not understanding how one interconnects incompatible protocols (through the use of bridges, protocol gateways, etc.)
- Market, social, investment, and cultural aspects
- Acknowledging that most operators want a self-contained radio whether a handheld, mobile, or base.
- Interconnect issues to external devices creating more points of failure
- Aesthetics – lost on the experimenter, but for the larger community there is value in an attractive package.
- They want to buy something off the shelf that is ready to use. (USTrust registration is problematic for this)
- People who have made investments in infrastructure (repeaters, gateways, etc.) don’t want them “broken” by non-compliant systems
- Some people like the clarity of AMBEs vocoder and don’t want it mixed with analog or even other systems that don’t fit the same profile.
I, and I venture many others, look forward to additional digital voice and data options. Maybe something will come of Codec-2, maybe not. If it proves to be a better technical (not religious) solution and a manufacturer picks it up to create the self-contained radios to build out an entire network like D-STAR, great, the market will decide. I believe digital is the future and it will evolve, but basically I think the plea is basically, bluntly, “put up or shut up” — in other words, do the work to build something and put it out, in the meantime use what is available without this continued babble about how evil AMBE/D-STAR is and if “somebody” would just make “this change” it would be so much …Let’s use the D-STAR and related forums and groups to work on D-STAR. If one wants to do something different create your own community/forum/group and have at it.