At DEFCON in RF Village, we had a place to demonstrate work from ORI. We showed off open source synthetic aperture radar with coffee cans and GNU Radio and a PLUTO, and had space to show our “FT8 performance for keyboard chat” RFBitBanger QRP HF kit. We had room for the regulatory work for ITAR/EAR/219 MHz. And, very importantly – we had enough space to show major components of our UHF and up comms Opulent Voice system for amateur terrestrial and satellite fully up and running. At DEFCON, we had the human-radio interface and the modem as separate fully functional demonstrations.
Today, these two components have been combined and are working end-to-end. It’s coughing and sputtering, but it’s a solid first light. This means that microphone/keyboard/data processing from user input to waveforms over the air are happening.
The design goals for Opulent Voice project are to deliver very good voice quality in a modern way. AMBE/CODEC2 honestly sound terrible. Amateur radio deserves better audio quality. Therefore, we baseline Opus 16 kbps. It sounds great. Want more? there’s a path to 32 kbps.
We were very tired of a separate broken packet mode for data in ham digital voice product after ham digital voice product. Opulent Voice has keyboard chat and data in a single prioritized stream. No separate clunky packet mode. No 1980s architecture. It just works. In your browser. Or, at a command line interface. Chat only with transcriptions of all the audio received? With a microphone all in your ears and you never have to look at a screen? Your choice.
There are transcriptions for received audio (if you want that – it’s configurable), and text to speech for text messages is literally the next issue to be addressed. Accessibility is designed in from the start.
For terrestrial use, we have a demonstration conference server running on ORI’s Linode instance. This was up and running for DEFCON. It’s internet-only implementation of the repeater for terrestrial or space use, so that folks can see what the UI/UX looks like.
Everything is open source. Upcoming events? Opulent Voice will be presented to the ESA, AMSAT-DL, JAMSAT, and others in the next few months.
To everyone here that’s been supportive and wonderful – thank you so much.
RF Village has been instrumental and irreplaceable for this work to get a wider audience. This has been of enormous help. The benefits last year-round.
We’ve exhibited, presented, and contributed towards Ham Radio Village as well.
Here’s where we’ve been publishing and documenting the work. Under active decelopment. Approach with the usual caution.
https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/interlocutor human-radio interface
https://github.com/Abraxas3d/pluto-msk-application frames-to-modem application code for PLUTO SDR. Accepts Interlocutor connections and delivers them to the PLUTO Opulent Voice modem.
https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/pluto_msk Locutus, the firmware for the PLUTO SDR that makes the Opulent Voice waveforms.
Want to set up your own repeater for Opulent Voice?
https://github.com/OpenResearchInstitute/locus
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