Astro over the Internet

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Larry I see you and I raise you.

We will do the same for any volunteers regardless of your hardware....we will send you a free copy of our client and a hardware interface. all you need to have is a 33.6kkps connection and above and a repeater or simplex base with a high TX/RX point and we will send you all the software/hardware for free less shipping.....works great...DTMF controlable, we have it linked into NEXTEL so advise your Direct connect and we'll patch anyone through, even lowband CSQ simplex base stations apply!. Join in the revolution. We also build repeater w/ built in embedded computers onboard. Kind of like his quantar for like $8000 less - (if you can get over not having Motorola.) We like to say we are like napster for tower/repeater sites and two-way radio. We have other nifty things too. Anyone interested feel free to enquire.

Later,
Steve

[ASTROMODAT]

Steve, your system sounds awesome, especially for Ham use, and the like.

My system is designed around complying with the various 3 and 4 digit Federal Agencies contract requirements that expressly mandate full P25 compatibility in order to be eligible to bid on their contracts. This Internet connectivity and control between multiple existing Quantars connected to DIU 3000's via ASTRO modems over private lines (or local V.24 ASTRO modem signaling) is fully P25 compatible, including both clear and encrypted IMBE, and both Acknowledged and Unacknowledged P25 data packets (P25 qualified Data 18 and Data 12 packets). This system also transparently complies with and supports all ASTRO modem 9.6 kb/s embedded Quantar signaling requirements. In short, we can tie together any number of multiple P25 systems in the world, with full transparency, while transparently keeping all ASTRO signaling intact, as well as the D12 and D18 P25 data requirements. We are not out there selling Quantars, etc, but we can link these existing systems together via the Net for a very small incremental cost.

Anyways, good luck with your IRLP-like project. Sounds pretty neat!

Larry

[/\/\y 2 cents]

We can do the same thing with keeping all astro (or any digital for that matter) signalling charachteristics intact, we just don't bear any motorola logo, pretty much we make our own 3rd party DIU for ANY brand. We have software to emulate and take any analog signal from it's midpoint and turn it into P25 packets and send them over IP..on analog, we use special high end, optical based audio pass filters to also transfer sub audible trunking data seamlessly bewtween controllers on different sites so if you have (2) smartnet systems with controllers in which the ID you want to "light up"on the other tower is in the controller, it will aquire a open trunking channel on the 2nd system and speak to the 2nd controller just like it spoke to the first, relaying the ISW handshake information to the 2nd controller gtoo. Yes it's good for ham, but even better for commercial and law enforcement...why you ask? because on the commercial, industrial and law enforcement systems, the content is of high importance....making the power of what we do even more evident. Motorola is nice, but not the final word in this fledgling industry.

[ASTROMODAT]

Steve, no offense, but your post is starting to sound like a cowthief post. You said: "pretty much we make our own 3rd party DIU for ANY brand." Therefore, you are saying that your 3rd party DIU can play with Motorola's Quantar (I assume "ANY" includes Motorola.) Regarding a "third party DIU," are you saying that you are using a DVSI IMBE vocoder? As you know, there is no vocoder in the Quantar, so the only way to recover the IMBE audio from a Quantar is via a DIU, unless you have contracted with DVSI for their vocoder chip. I’d be very curious to know more about your “3rd party DIU.”

You mention that you can handle all forms of digital signaling, including the ASTRO modem 9.6 kb/s control signaling, in that you have this 3rd party DIU. Steve, this signaling scheme is highly proprietary to Motorola, and I doubt you could even sell something like this without a major business agreement with Motorola. That would be akin to folks who have tried to tinker with MDC, and the like, and you know what has happened to them. Keep in mind that ASTRO modem signaling is a few orders of magnitude more complex than MDC.

For the moment, let's forget the business and legal aspects of "copying" Motorola's ASTRO modem signaling proprietary format, and consider the technical depth of implementing their signaling scheme in your 3rd party DIU box. As you may or may not know, the Summit repeater will eventually be replacing the Quantar repeater. Motorola is currently pondering whether it will be economically viable to write the code into DSP to emulate the existing ASTRO modem boards in their new Summit. The issue is the significant development cost to soft code the ASTRO modem signaling protocol into firmware, as opposed to implementing it in hardware (as it is in the DIU and the Quantar). From your post, you must have apparently already done this, as you said your system is using a “3rd party DIU.” Interesting, since Motorola has a few more resources than you do, and yet it's not clear to them that their significant development cost to code these ASTRO modem signaling protocols into software is even economically viable for them. Don't forget that Motorola is the designer of the ASTRO modem, and you would have to first reverse engineer it (more legal issues here!) before you could even attempt to start coding anything into software to create a 3rd party DIU. This reverse engineering effort of the DIU, in and of itself, would be worthy of a huge technical celebration, not withstanding needing the services of Mark Gerigose soon thereafter.

A 3rd party DIU also has the issue of encoding and decoding into DTMF the APCO P25 Unacknowledged Data 12 packets, and data converting the P25 Acknowledged Data 18 packets in your “3rd party DIU.” This area is almost as complex as the ASTRO modem signaling protocol. If you think decoding P25 D12 and D18 packets is an easy engineering task, then check out the fact that neither the behemoth General Dynamics nor IFR have been able to implement this capability in their P25 high end $25,000 system test sets (at least not as of 6 months ago). Perhaps you have a better design team than GD (former Motorola) or IFR?

Yaesu has their WIRES II box and associated software that sell for under $150. It works with a PC and sound card so Hams can send their repeater traffic over the Internet via VoIP. It uses DTMF for commnds. Here it is: http://www.vxstd.com/en/wiresinfo-en/ This is what I assumed you were trying to compete with. But when you said you have a “3rd Pary DIU,” you are talking about a whole nother can of worms.


I don't know, Steve...

Larry

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Well,

Go to http://www.vanu.com we use the same basic thing as their Pocket PC device but on a desktop computer and over the internet instead of re-broadcasting a newly made digital waveform, we take the "enhanced" signal and we put it through the internet. Our software we almost have completed has different codecs you can select on the fly and instead of putting them on an RF carrier, you send it using IP packet switching. if every analog conventional system has this, they now are project 25. Project 25 sucks though and is really not very efficent so we also let the customer use other codecs by pointing and clicking, all written into the software. We also have DTMF to ascii and other voltage bus based signalling formats built right in....what we are witnessing is called software defined radio...Larry you have to realize there is alot of other things going on out there other than motorola and what they tout as their latest and greatest..[/i]

[KG6EAQ]

Well,

Go to http://www.vanu.com we use the same basic thing

Should we assume that your hightech company/group doesn't have their own website?

[ASTROMODAT]

Steve, you didn't even begin to address my questions about your "3rd Party DIU" box and how it can interface with an ASTRO modem. Don't lower yourself to cowthiefs modus operandi.

larry

[/\/\y 2 cents]

look, im not saying it does everything of a DIU 3000....it does do alot of the features that motorola's new line will try to incorporate..by the way I found out about cowtheif's "handyphone" system in japan...it turns out the dude is right....there is a such thing (it's pretty neat too, much like what I envision for the united states, and I wouldnt be surprised if the japaneese consulate has set up that kind of system because its pretty freaking sweet..think of telario and nextel in one handset and lots of people own inexpensive telario systems with cordless phone coverage...no im not trying to be elusive but a regular PC can do everything of a DIU w/ proper software...ours doesnt do everything...but then again we strive to satisfy the killer apps department, astro modems dont really fit into the killer apps department they are more of the special needs department.[/list]

[/\/\y 2 cents]

we have a website, http://www.criticalrf.com but im trying to find away to get my brochures uploaded to the page...they are like 16mb PDF's. I cant figure out why they are so big. I did them in adobe pagemaker. I know nothing about the web design thing. im ashamed. I dont have enough patience to sit like that, im constantly on the move...We try to sell radios too and I figured out how to link my hyperlink's to motorola's site so I don't have to make radio brochures. Anyways..we are a ground zero operation right now, im not claiming to be anything were not. We know what we have though and aren't afraid to sell it cheap or give it away to get people to understand how incredible some of the products we are working on really are. All I know is through a very special person on the board, and my old computer science professor, my ideas have been taking shape and they work well and are definitley marketable...it's a rat race with the big boys and we arent afriad to give thing out and bite the bullet to prove our point. I want to show all you guy though...its just a matter of time before I get the page finished off.. the links are there for my branded products but like I said the files are enormous and I dont have the patience to figure it out right now. I can email pics though once i find the cable to my roomate's digital camera.
anyways I'll
follow up eventually

[/\/\y 2 cents]

I also just read some more of your post since I read in bits and pieces and write my reply's as I react to different aspects of your post. You speak of a reverse engeneering of the DIU3000. There dosent need to be any reverse engineering taking place to interface something into a certain piece of hardware or realize and know how to duplicate a technique or effect that a certain company creates, we create it but we use a different set of paths to achieve the same result....it's like saying a company like kenwood reverse engineered motorola's speaker mic to make a speaker mic for themselves. everybody realizes you must use pins and contacts...if you know enough about the most drilled down elments of something you can pretty much understand how it works by just looking at it and understanding how the feature/fuction was achieved. These things arent some mystery. Thats why you love Motorola so much...you are somebody this type of technology is brought to by a manufacturer that can use it and appreciate it and are fascinated by it. I work for a medium sized business on the side to support my little start-up and they think nextelcame from god, wjen I know what the real story is, but that is their role, to use it, not try and compete wuith it. There is nothing wrong with that, everybody has brands of products they love and get excited with and are amazed by. Your a user. Every company needs users...every magician needs an audience to showcase and strike up intrigue. You are that audience. My intrgue turned to insatiable curiosity and now I find myself trying to create and intruige just like the guys do for you at motorola. Hopefully I'll stir up a grassoots following by making a fair priced item that seems like a magic trick to people who just wanna use the medium. You can't get sued for agreeing with a company on how to interface and create features or functions..my company and motorola both agree that an external interface box that has a multitude of features that is sold seperately is a way to deliver extra funtionality to existing users and a way to provide a cost effective upgrade path for people with an significant inverstment in hardware...that's all. No "stealing secrets." BTW, not that I follow the scott petersen trial or anything but you spelled that lawyers name wrong..it Geragos. [/i]

[alex]

For what it's worth - it is only 9600 baud data - which well, isn't very much. If you built something that took the data out of the air and could encapsulate it into ethernet - you could essentially bridge it - and bridge it back the same way.

There's really no taking appart or putting it back together - and you really wouldn't have voice issues - since your just "repeating" what you hear.

Kinda like a hub in ethernet.

But, I'm scratching the surface of what you two are talking about.

-Alex

[ASTROMODAT]

Steve, you apparently still don't get it. You said that you have created a 3rd party DIU that works with any vendor. You said this, not me: "pretty much we make our own 3rd party DIU for ANY brand." Therefore, you are saying that your 3rd party DIU can play with Motorola's Quantar (I assume "ANY" includes Motorola)!

I don't believe that your 3rd party DIU can work with Motorola's Quantar, which represents 98% of the installed P25 infrastructure currently out there. The Quantar is entirely controlled via the ASTRO modem (assuming you are controlling it remotely to support IMBE and/or mixed mode operations). The DIU must have the exact ASTRO modem protocol incorporated, or you can't talk to the ASTRO board in the Quantar. I do not believe it is likely you have anywhere near the resources required to reverse engineer the DIU ASTRO modem, not withstanding the fact that it is highly proprietary, and Motorola would come after you if you did this. If you don’t reverse engineer the ASTRO modem, how in the heck do you expect your 3rd party DIU to communicate with this non-published, proprietary protocol that is an order of magnitude more complex than MDC? Sorry, this is not a set of microphone pins that you can duplicate, Steve. Your analogy to this is so far off base as to tell me you just plain don’t get it!

Next, you changed your story, Steve. You started backing off, and you said in a later post: "look, I'm not saying it does everything of a DIU 3000…"

O.K., Steve the DIU 3000 does 4 major things: (Note: This is by no means a complete list of the DIU functions! It does a ton of additional functions.)

1. Incorporates the DVSI IMBE VOCODER to encode analog voice to digital IMBE, and to decode digital IMBE to analog voice. (To date, no one has done this with their own software, and you’ve made no mention of using DVSI’s VOCODER chip, nor their IMBE firmware on DSP, which is the heart of the DIU.)

2. P25 compatible encryption and decryption of the IMBE voice stream, using DES-OFB and AES. (Again, I do not believe you have created such encryption chips.)

3. ASTRO signaling to/from the ASTRO modem board in the remote Quantar to control the station for IMBE and mixed mode operations. (No one has a compatible ASTRO modem outside of Motorola.)

4. Encode analog DTMF into P25 Unacknowledged Data 12 packets, and decode P25 Unacknowledged Data 12 packets into analog DTMF. (This functionality is built into the DIU, and to date, neither GD nor IFR have been successful in incorporating this functionality into their $25,000+ system analyzers, so you can see why I am skeptical that you have accomplished this.)

Steve, I seriously doubt that your 3rd party DIU supports any of these 4 APCO P25 necessary features, especially in terms of compatibility with APCO P25 Motorola infrastructure, which accounts for 98% of the P25 infrastructure out there.

You may be thinking about doing something akin to Yaesu's WIRES II, but please don't try to pull the wool over our eyes and tell us that you have a 3rd party DIU that works with ANY vendor (it certainly does not work with Motorola).

I hope we can stop going around and around on this, Steve, as you are not answering any of my specific issues, but instead you are side stepping everything, and it's starting to look more and more like a cowthief post. Don’t dig yourself in any deeper than you already have.

BTW, you started this entire line of silliness by challenging me with what I believe to be a non-existent system. My point of my original post in this thread was to solicit volunteers to test with me. I offered to provide the use of a very expensive piece of network gear (a DVSI Net 2000 box), along with our proprietary interface box. In turn, the volunteer needs a working Quantar running mixed mode, with their DIU connected to the Quantar via leased lines. You then turned my request for a volunteer into a personal challenge to me, with a lot of information you can't back-up.

Thanks,

larry

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Look,

First off, my product (s) do exist, I envite you down to sunny south florida and even give your kids a free pass to disney world to occupy them while you relish in disbelief to prove to you what we are doing. Alex or whomever said it best in his above post. There is no backing off, there is no side-stepping. No our interface box does not support all of the features of a DIU 3000 because most of the feautres of the DIU3000 are not actually what any customers really need. I'm saying the DIU3000 is moving towards what we are achieving, they have the features that you are talking about with controllong the system via the astro modem etc, but are really moving to try and incorporate the aspects that we create. If anything they are trying to create what we have already created which is intergrated ethernet linking. The modem stuff for them is old news and not a feature they see themselves making much money with on in the future. For them the golden egg is the ethernet bridging and taking the un-converted p25 waveform and sending it over ethernet with out a D/A conversion. No you dont need a vocoder in the classical sense you think of it (an IC with the DSP loaded into it.) we have PC software that does the same thing. This is simply a way to encode/decode. a company called MXCOM has the DSP software that not only does project 25 but tetra, CDMA, etc and all we have done is integrate that into our software. I really have nothing to prove and can't help you if you are a skeptic. We can write our stuff to do EVERYTHING the DIU does, unfourtuantely for power users like you, we do not care what it does, we focus on IP bridging, but can write it to emulate a DIU functions if you are going to actually buy the product. Hell I'll do just about anything for the right price.it seems Motorola is scrambling to write what we are doing into the existing DIU so im pretty sure we are on the right track. There is no sense in us moving backwards to cover bases they already have for a very small amout of users. We can though for contract manufaturing and software development so all of our bases are coverd and they aren't anywhere close to us in IP related functionality. Basically they are trying to move forward covering the bases we already have, and the rug has been pulled from beneath their feet. We are in a position to lead at this point the way I see it because we arent locked into one brand and tier, thats the beauty of it..they cant only put it on a small amount of their products, we play nice with just about everybody's stuff.

[Pj]

Ooooook....

Both of you put your Astro Sabers away and get back to the orignal topic!

If you would like to contiune this in a new topic about "DIU Interfacing" or whatever, I'd be happy to split these threads into a new topic.

Pj

[/\/\y 2 cents]

I just want to take him up his offer and interface our in house brand box into the factory DIU to show that we can play nice with everybody's stuff thats all. It was for more of my satisfaction than anything else.

No astro sabers here!

Regards,
Steve

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Im sorry I said interface when I meant to say connect over the web...for me it is interface because I basically slaveda and paid through he nose and worked 2 jobs to get it connecting up to the other side witch was IP based P25 over ethernet. For us it sort of was interfacing in a programming capacity. The codec package we chose originally did not have project 25 A/D, but pretty much everything else. TDMA, CDMA, FDMA, TETRA, GSM, H.323, G.711, etc all rolled up into one "kit". Sorry no iDEN (now that is what they are protecting.) Finally they released the updated software pkg w/ P25, but not that accurate and reliable for packet loss, jitter, it wouldn't syc up right according to my programmer. It really was a poor implementation of P25 but much cheaper than all of this DVSI crap and still had a fairly low PPM fail rate, or so we thought. so we took the pkg. that load onto the various dsp's and then use the source that you get with it since it is in binary hex or some nonsense and a developers kit and we blew it open and wrote it into very cheap windows and linux (almost) software and cleaned up the p25 code as well as posible without even seeing the DVSI code. It can run on a minimum spec computer. In fact you can make an entire cell cite from one pentium 133 PC...Just get bare bone base trancievers and all the cell logic is on a freakin little PC....This is what the cell companies have been waiting for to tackle dead spots and rural areas where the return of investment is low and not economical to place a tower...we are going after this stuff and are trying to get out there and compete. Not all of our stuff is sellable just yet it's still being experimented with, the same way we cleaned up the MXCOM code. In so many words, I just wanted to see if our genreric DIU would talk to your "offical DIU" thats all.

[tvsjr]

My apologies to the mods in advance, but...

Sounds to me like you reverse-engineered the codec ("blew open" the developer's kit). That's likely a breach of contract and a violation of intellectual property protection laws.

You have a product which you claim exists, but none of us have ever seen it. You have no website for said product, and the website you do have looks juvenile (the Mambo engine is cool, but pages aren't populated, etc.). You claim that "we" have done all this but there's no mention of other people on the website, and the domain is registered in your name alone. You claim to have "blown open" IMBE and have your magic widget, but you claim inability to publish a simple PDF. Your misuse of the English language is atrocious (most engineers can write reasonably well, because it's a required part of their job (doing preliminary documentation, etc.))

I call ********. Put up or shut up. I'll eat my words if you show me a DIU3000-killer, but I highly doubt that's going to happen.

[/\/\y 2 cents]

First off, I didn't blow open the codec or reverse engineer it, my computer science teacher assistant did (recent Phd.). Second I could care less about the law, go chase people commiting crimes no curious experiments. My only role in this is it's my idea and baby. Yes our website sucks but that just comes with the territory of scraping by and trying to save enough money to get out on the road and start touring around in a RV with fancy graphics wrap. We all know hardly any major radio money is spent on the internet, most internet radio sales are to penny pinchers and thrifty hobbyists like yourself anyways and we know thtas not where the numbers are to be done. The people who will buy this will never spend a day on batlabs and use radio for work, not pleasure. If you are serious about purchasing one we will drive out to see you and drop it off...I made PDF brochures to try and post to internet in Adobe illustrator and they are something like 16mb so if you want to sit there and wait for the page to load thats fine with me. I felt making a slow PDF download would hurt our image more than just being honest and telling people we are having technical difficulties. I'm not worried about lawsuits, breach of any agreements etc, so keep your scare tactics to yourself, nothing would delight me more than going to jail for trying to topple big bloated radio giants, at least I can say I have a cause in life. I could care less about getting sued or thrown in jail becuase I know that we haven't done any finacial damage to anyone (just yet). And when the money starts rolling in it will be re-invested to make sure everything is air-tight and goes through the proper channels. Like I said we are a fly on a cows ass so playing by the rules dosent matter to myself and my crew because we are hungry enough to take the risk. People like yourself who are worried about the rules needent apply, keep paying your motorola prices and go on with your life ... this is a take no prisoners david and goliath type fight for us we don't care what anyone has to say except the customers willing to take a chance to let us prove ourselves.

[alex]

Lets break this down for a second here -

You have a digital protocol that is sent OTA between two devices - portable to portable, base to portable, portable to repeater.

Now. You go out and build a data slicer that has the ability to properly record and encapsulate the 9600 baud data that is sent OTA. So now you have it on a computer level. You can then build a protocol around that to send it over whatever medium you want. All you have to do is ensure that the data is correctly rebuilt on the other end, and then retransmitted back out over the air.

If you were to do this, you could build a bridge between two units.

Remember - astro data is only 9600 baud - most cable modems and more than reliably move this amount of data at a good speed.

Astro Modems (and someone can correct me if I'm wrong) probably do exactly the same thing. Encapsulate the data for transmission over phone or other medium in a digital -> analog conversion, and then build it back.

Now think of an ethernet hub (aka repeter). All this hub will do is take in whatever it gets, and spit it back out to it's respective ports. If it gets a collission, it'll make it even louder and send it back down the line. It has no control over the bits.

Lets now look at a switch. A switch brings up the level of options avalible. The only time you see another ports traffic on your leg of the switch is when your talking directly to that port. Other than that, your traffic is always kept clean and filtered by the switch. no collissions.

Routers actually look at the traffic, and do even more filtering and control over the movment of data.

This is essentially the 3 layers of the OSI model (which has but those are the first 3.

Now - lets compare those.

I would expect an Astro Modem would be equivilent to a Layer 1 device. It's dumb as a rock, all it does is covert the analog -> digital signals for processing by the DIU or other such device.

I would expect a DIU to be a bit more interprative along the lines of a router or switch. I've never played with one, so I'm just guessing what it would be able to do.

My guess is that My 2 Cents developed a way to make an astro modem move the 9600 baud data from point a->b.

Make a little bit of sense?

-Alex

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Thank you alex...I dont know how it works I just presented my ideas to people who knoew more than me and they clarifed it on a technical level and acted on what I tried to convey and we came up with a method that just happens to be a logical way to economically accomplish something that is apparently no big deal in the experienced programmers field. I explained to them the radio applications, they got the picture and slaved over what I said and guess what...here we are today. They understand these things on a fundamental level and are real talented, I just think it up and try sell it.

[ASTROMODAT]

Once again, the ASTRO modem protocol is highly proprietary, and it is non published. The only way to communicate with a Quantar remotely for mixed mode or IMBE ops is via the ASTRO modem protocol. Therefore, even if one is so stupid as to not be concerned about stealing IP from Motorola and DVSI, one would have to reverse engineer all three of these proprietary elements (e.g., the IMBE protocol, the VOCODER’s human voice and sounds detailed codebook, and the ASTRO modem protocol) in order to support a successful communication.

The reason this guy is BS'ing the Board is that I do not believe he has the resources to obtain the $10,000 DIU in the first place. Secondly, even if he had the DIU, he has no where near the necessary resources to undertake such a Herculean effort. Moreover, to date there has been no one that has been able to stream IMBE over the Internet. How do I know this? I asked Motorola's Infrastructure Team, as well as several engineers at DVSI. I guess they could all be wrong, and Steve knows more than they do, but why do I doubt this?

Finally, to implement IMBE without DVSI's chip, one would have to first reverse engineer their protocol. And, then you'd have to exactly duplicate their codebook, or there could be no interoperability with an IMBE vocoder on the other end. DVSI had a large engineering team work for 4 years to develop the original voice and sounds codebook for the IMBE vocoder, and it has since been updated a few times. It is laughable to think that Steve could develop an exactly compatible codebook with his scant resources. (must be that his teacher’s assistant is Einstein’s grandson, or the like).

I've heard of companies reverse engineering some rather complex chips, but reverse engineering a codebook is unheard of. I don't know of any case where anyone has been able to successfully reverse engineer a vocoder's codebook. The protocol would be difficult enough, but the associated codebook would be essentially impossible to reverse engineer. One would have to essentiaslly steal the voice and sounds codebook.

Steve, you have become the new and improved cowthief, and improved because you are a bigger Blowhard than even he, something I would have thought was impossible, until now. I figure you are probably just jerking our collective chains for a big laugh.

larry

[/\/\y 2 cents]

well with all of the back and forth I must say there is one thing we agree on- that it has been a herclulean effort. I dropped out of a top 50 university and lived very poor and became and still am a bit mad/obsessed for the last 2 years over persuing all of these different aspects we have discussed. Cowtheif isn't as bad as you think either..Sometimes I lose him a little but I sometimes can follow his train of thought, so I see that as somewhat of a compliment althought I realize the connotation in which you use the phrases with his name in them. it turned out he was on track about the handyphone system in japan, infact many service monitors specifically state they are a compatible test set for the "handyphone system" and it's related protocols. America is quite behind and has been on motorola's very short dog leash in terms of what we see and what is thought of to be possible. I think we should chill with all of the challenges of if things exist or not because new things are created everyday, we can't control it or possibly be everywhere at everytime to know all in existence, thats what the process of learning is all about. You can't teach this kind of stuff at a college, thats the majic of what we are doing, it's a day to day scavenger hunt for bit and pieces and we learn along the way too.

[willbartlett]

OK, I didn't want to wade into this, but I feel that there is a simple clarification that could clear up a lot of this. I think that it is probably incorrect to call the product (hardware?) My2cents speaks of as a DIU. I saw one in DC a couple weeks ago, and it's definitely on the level of a switch or Heavily managed hub, as Alex correctly described. If I understand correctly, the thing My 2 cents is describing is a (hopefully) robust a/d converter mated to a network device of some sort. We do things like this all the time at my job. You digitize an incoming waveform, either oversampled and dealt with locally before transmission or directly demodulated and sent as raw binary. Package it in a routable message format, add FEC and send it on its way. Pick up the bits at the other end, D/A them and modulate whatever transmitter you have it connected to.

FRom what I have been hearing from Astromodat, the DIU strips off a number of status bits to send seperate from the encoded voice, and it requires some local smarts to do this. I'm sure the DIU has the ability to rout traffic to multiple addresses based on the ID or talkgroup data or whatever other signalling, something a simple a/d-d/a system would never do.

My 2 cents item will never be able to route or manage traffic like a DIU, but it doesent seem to be what they're after. If you store, and then rebroadcast the whole bit pattern from an astro transmission with sufficient fidelity, I'll guarantee it would play back properly .You're not really infringing on anyones copyright, just recording and playing back a sample of data, and that seems simple enough. With the notable exception of the DMCA and that whole storm , I can't see where the storage and rebroadcast of raw data becomes an IP issue at all. and it probably would work for any digital format, but there are some stringent engineering challenges that need to be met for it to be fully transparent . I couldn't do it personally, but I know quite a few graduate students who could.

Semantics. Can't we all just get along?

Will

[ASTROMODAT]

It's not a matter of semantics. Steve is claiming to have developed a 3rd party DIU, which he said will work with ANY vendor. This is not possible, since the IMBE vocoder contained therein is proprietary, as is the ASTRO code.

[willbartlett]

Ah, OK, ignorance on my end. I missed a couple posts by Steve. I'll go slink away now.

In all seriousness, it isn't impossible to reverse engineer a data stream, I've seen the results of such attempts, and it can be done, but it is a daunting task. you must exhaust every permutation of code before you have it "cracked" Usually that takes many $$$ in a laboratory environment, but engineering students have done some pretty amazing things in the past.

In any case, I agree with Larry about needing to have an existing system at a minimum to test with before declaring to the world that you have a working system. that's a pricey endeavor.

Will

[Wowbagger]

1. Incorporates the DVSI IMBE VOCODER to encode analog voice to digital IMBE, and to decode digital IMBE to analog voice. (To date, no one has done this with their own software, and you’ve made no mention of using DVSI’s VOCODER chip, nor their IMBE firmware on DSP, which is the heart of the DIU.)

larry

Actually, the 2975 incorporates the DVSI code into our DSPs, rather than using a DVSI supplied chip.

However, we also had to pay DVSI US$100K for the priviledge.

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Well lets just say when you don't have $100,000 for what you want, what do you do..?...scheme and go absolutely crazy in order to get it. You stop at nothing. you bother people who you know dont even want anything to do with you. I've called people over and over again, ask some people on this board just to scratch the surface. You do whatever you have to do and rattle the chain of anyone along the way to get the answers you want. I bugged enough people who knew what they were doing. I got them to all produce different aspects at different times-like little sections of an orchestra- and now those little sections are together playing like the
philharmonic. Look, like wowbagger just said, P25 digital is not actually hardware, but software. those little "chips" you speak of are blank in the beginning of the day, and you can store porn on them if you want to. The actual DSP and A/D coversions are all done by software at the end of the day. They are only on those little "chips" because they are in highly compact, durable, and highly integrated radios and related acessories. The p25 technique's equivalent for use in many other different little industries can be found floating around in many differnt form factors, including manipulatable code. oh yeah, it's happens to be considered a highly inferior codec out there in the land of codec whacker's but that is another topic and we are radio whackers so never mind what they do. DVSI's code has many contemporaries and IEEE equivalents that basically are the same thing as DVSI's p25. It's like the Apple firewire and the sony vaio "i-link" firewire....Both are firewire at the bus level, but sony changed the plug to some stupid mini connector that is sort of propriatery and is their move to make a branding statement. DVSI did just that with P25 but on a very drilled down fundamental computer genious type level. So when the "computer genius" compares the two, the people who literally eat, sleep and, breath code..see this, they arent fooled because it all tells a story..they simply understand it for what it's worth and begin thinking of similar ways to achieve the same effect for me. Now, I said it can strap to a quantar or any other analog or digital repeater or mobile so they act as te rf deck, and send and recieve through and from the internet in many other various voice codec's including our own little redition of p25...kinda like when motorola did LTR and didnt completely adhere to the LTR standards because of licensing type things...so they called it "LS trunking" and got things to work..ever notice why some of the older motorola LTR radios have access time issues with the LTR ...especially the GTX...Well we're kinda doing the same type thing with p25 except here's the difference..the market is ripe and the stakes are higher, with the LTR thing, nextel had been killing SMR for a year or so the market was not ripe and the stakes weren't very high, infact there was no incentive to fix the things because the market was dwindling. Thats not the postion we're in. How do you think datron and other wacky p25 people keep coming out with hardware ...they get the p25 codec's like us, we just dont make end to end digital radios (yet). we have a strong belief that the RF side should be left analog and the midpoint can feed into a digital pipe. Hence the incrdible value of being able to make the "back end" of any analog or digital radio system connect to one another via IP..we make it do p25 over IP or analog into p25 then over IP.

[willbartlett]

Not to be a wise a$$, but who else makes a P25 compliant codec? I'm not trying to be gruff, I'm actually serious. I'd love to find something in the public domain I could port to a PC and play with. Only problem is, if there is in fact an IEEE variant out there, if it doesent support every feature, you may find yourself in an unpleasant sales position. Copy Motorolas licenced variant of it bit function for bit function, and I guarantee you'll regret it, bravado or not. Nobody fights for market share like the ones who already have it, just look at the last election, or the banking industry, or the energy industry.

If it doesen't integrate seamlessly with the Mot stuff, I think you will find customers a little hesitant to invest in a build implimenting something without 5-9s reliability when they can go to the original. I know, that's why you piped up. I'd love to see some competition too.

Will

[/\/\y 2 cents]

thats just the thing...the version that is based on the same algorithmns or whatever arent 100% compatible with project 25. Thats the tough position we are in right now. I asked larry to test it with us because he has the big time $$ equipment which the the 100% accurate stuff. Not to often do a bunch of nerds get a chance to test it out LEGALLY, without being squirrel on some gov't agencies ASTRO system. Thats why I jumped at the opportunity.it goes through but on some bits there is holes in audio, just things like that we have been trying to patch up...A company called MXCOM is where we got all the codecs from and TI is where you get the chips to load it onto (if you want to put it on a chip, we wanted to run it through a PC to keep the price down.) MXCOM was just bought and changed their name. here's the link....www.mxcom.com it will redirect you to their new company. Check it out.

[/\/\y 2 cents]

CMX980 is the one that supports P25 as well as tetra but like the other guy said it is a tough sell because of the fact that it isn't 100% compliant with all of the ratified P25, it does work though pretty well. It's really like their newest product. There is one coming out soon that has better p25 quality I think it is the CMX982 but this was over a year ago when I delt with these guys.

[ASTROMODAT]

The only legitimate and legal supplier of the P25 IMBE protocol is DVSI. Secondly, you can NOT reverse engineer a codebook. Steve, I doubt you even know what a codebook is, in connection with a vocoder. If you did, you'd understand why it can't be reverse engineered. It can only be stolen from the vendor in a James Bond/cowthief like scenario, or the license can be legitimately paid for.

larry

[/\/\y 2 cents]

Of course I know what a codebook is....a codebook is a book of code