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iPhone Interface For Ham Radio Mates Old With New
jjp9999 writes "By using the same technology found in older modems, Thomas Tumino, vice president of the Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club, has invented an iPhone interface for ham radios. He told The Epoch Times, 'Today there are iPhone apps where you can use the systems in the phone — and its sound card, which is being used as a modem ... And then you connect that into your radio with an interface like this, that just isolates the telephone from the radio, and then you can do all sorts of things.'"
Maybe now they will have a signal good enough to make a call.
This is one huge step for locally based information networks finally becoming accessible. We've grown used to the world wide web, but what are the implications of sharing a net that only covers a small local or regional area?
I don't know what this story is about, but there is a lawsuit in there somewhere.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If you want real info, with pics and video, just Google, iphone ham radio interface.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's good to see people doing stuff, but this article is a decade or two out of date.
Hams have been hooking computers to radios for a long, long time.
There are hundreds of pages on digital radio and sound card interfacing:
try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK31
http://hfradio.org.uk/html/digital_modes.html
http://www.tapr.org/packetradio.html
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Technical_Reference/Sound_Card_Radio_Interfacing/
iPhone Interface For Ham Radio Mates Old With New
Who says Ham Radio is old? It started in 1909, six years after the electrical outlet was patented, which the iPhone already utilized. The iPhone is just catching up with latter-day interfaces.
sodium cloud? Huh?
The quality of reporting in this article really sucks. The printed circuit boards on top of the tins are not 'telegraph keys', they're the transmitters and the white box is the iPhone interface. Quite where the 'sodium clouds' come in I have no idea because in thirty years of ham radio operation I've never seen one, heard of one or used one to make a contact with a fellow ham.
Ganty
I went to a Maker Faire a few months back and started talking to some HAM radio operators. They told me that far from a dead activity, they have actually gone digital, incorporating the Internet to connect to transceivers for when they aren't able to have an antenna in thir back yard. One other technology mentioned was SDR, otherwise known as software defined radio. SDR means that the necessary hardware is simpler, with the majority of the signal processing now in software. There is an SDR app for the iPhone, but you need a piece of hardware that plugs ino the antenna and also plugs into the headphone jack of the phone. I haven't looked at Android, but I imagine you could use some form of GnuRadio.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=604
Ham Radio meets iPhone
when bores collide.
From the headline, I just has a picture in my head of somebody with an iPhone porking a Ham. I'm too scared to RTFA as I am looking forward to some nookie with my wife this morning.
Linux already has a huge software following in the ham radio/geek world. As does some commercial Windows and Mac software. The ability to digitise a ham signal with audio is nothing new it is just slower than molasses and not really practical for communication of anything of size at all. The high audio frequency spectrum is awash with interference over short wave and the only place you can modulate the sound adequately to do accurate digital is in the lower more stable frequencies. As a consequence the data speed is slow. High bandwidth data requires accurate signal at extremely high frequencies that do not skip or get blasted during the day by ionic interference. ..you sometimes never know who you might wind up talking to!
The only advantage is shortwave skip and this is problematic as hell as the nature of the skip does not mean that you necessarily will be able to receive or communicate with all places on the globe all the time. But this is the selling attraction to real Hams
DAH DIT DAH DIT DAH DAH DIT DAH
The author apparently thinks he writes for Wired magazine. He can write sentence after sentence without saying anything. What a waste of an article. I still have no idea what this person did or why it is special. He says is that it's a white box that connects to an iPhone and and a Ham radio, and it takes him almost an entire article of babbling to say that. The inventor made it without plans and seems pretty jazzed that it's connected to an iPhone. Good for him. Perhaps it has something to do with calling satellites. And Cubans.
I was the guy who wrote this article. I have to say, I've had a few stories posted to Slashdot and it's always useful for feedback :) Just to clarify a few points though, in the picture, those little tin cans, Tumino actually did say they were telegraph keys. He had them on display next to an old antique one to show they're not hard to build. I guess the article was a bit babbly. It was written under a new column I started, basically just about people doing cool things with technology. I thought the ham radio guys were pretty cool, and I know that during the Arab Spring, when people were having their Internet shut down by governments, part of the care package released by Anonymous Operations taught people how to access the Internet over radio. So I thought this had some added relevance, since radio still does have some interesting uses when it comes to digital freedom, and you can do some pretty cool stuff with it. Also, sodium clouds do exist. They're pretty cool, actually: http://deep-red.sr.unh.edu/model/io/cloudescr.html
Amateurs have been doing this for a long, long time now (IE over a decade). This is not a SDR (software defined radio), but using a computer's audio card to encode and decode packet / APRS audio, which is essentially your old school modem. To be concise, the computer (or smartphone) acts as the TNC (Terminal Node Controller), which is connected to a radio via an interface that takes audio to and from the computer to the radio, with some method of telling the radio when to transmit (typically via an audio level threshold, but there are interfaces that allow the computer to explicitly control when the radio transmits). I own an AEA PK-232 Pakratt, which is a discrete, stand-alone TNC that goes between a computer and radio. Originally the computer was just the terminal, which connected to the TNC via a serial port. Now you can simply have the computer directly process / generate the audio using a sound card without requiring an actual TNC peripheral.
The "inventor" even states that there are multiple apps for iPhone available to do this - you just need a way to hook the audio up to a radio. Basically he created yet another custom hardware audio interface, and the writer of this story got all excited about it because it was news to him.
Look online, and you'll find dozens of designs for this exact thing. Here's a list of at least a dozen kits and pre-assembled interfaces for standard PC sound cards. Most of these should work with any smartphone with the proper 4 conductor 1/8" audio jack that cell phones use for both earphone and mic combined (whereas computer sound cards have those as two separate 1/8" connectors).
http://www.soundcardpacket.org/1cablekit.htm
That site is dedicated to the entire "computer as a TNC" concept, which is simply what is being down now with smartphones as well.
Better known as 318230.
Dont these people know that Hams have been doing packet radio for decades? This was long before cell phones even existed in the first place and most people didnt know a computer from a hole in the wall.
Acting like this is some sort of revolutionary concept is an insult to all the hard work that was done before.
---- Booth was a patriot ----