E1620: The Surprising Reason M17 was REMOVED from MMDVM

sending me information about what they were doing. One guy sent me an article that Jerry from Connect Systems had written about them trying to convince Jonathan Naylor, the main guy in charge of MMDVM, that he's the one who wants to drop it. And WPSD is what Bridgecom puts on their hotspots, and that's no longer including MMDVM. But that's outside of Bridgecomm's control. That's up to the WPSD developers. And if it wasn't some kind of turmoil, then it

wouldn't be ham radio. So here's an article. This came across my news story feed right about the time that everyone started sending me emails about it. MMDVM, a popular software and hardware project that powers many amateur rated hotspots, has announced the intention to drop M seventeen Digital Voice and Data Protocol as a supported mode. M seventeen is the newest mode. I've had the M seventeen guys on this channel a couple of times, interview them at a

couple of hamfests. It's a open source digital voice mode built on CODEC two, which is an open source codec. I'm going to talk about open source here in a little bit. I think open source is both good and bad. What do I mean by that? Stay tuned. Most of your other digital voice protocols, d STAR, DMR, System Fusion P twenty five and DS rely on a protocol called either amb AMBE or some of the older ones that

are IMBE. Both of these protocols are owned by a company called DVSI, and they make a chip that they will license to anyone. You just have to buy it from DVSI. That's why there's so many Chinese manufacturers making DMR radios, because you just purchase a license from DVSI, put the chip in your radio, and you're good. M seventeen and CODEC too. There's a lot more to it than that. I'm giving a very high level overview here.

M seventeen was the first one to not use a DVS SID chip, not use an AMB chip, They're using their own CODEC two, which is an open source digital voice codec. And it's been an open source project up until now. Let's keep reading. Inclusion of M seventeen among the supported modes of MMDVN project has been a major benefit to the current rate of adoption of M seventeen.

The first commercial radio supporting M seventeen shipped on the second half of twenty twenty four, that is the CS seven thy M seventeen, which I did a live stream about the CS seven M seventeen, which is actually sitting right here, So that was the first commercial radio being

sold with M seventeen adopted. The M seventeen project is an open source digital voice protocol that is positioned as an alternative digital modes that require the use of proprietary encoders such as the dvsside chip and be an imbe Codex is also an open source project that enables amateur radio hotspots to support multiple digital voice protoclous incouding, d STAR, DMRYSUP twenty five, NXDN and pok sag Okay, So if we click on this announced link right here, it brings

us to a groups dot io list, and this is a public message. I don't know if I'm even a member of this list, but it is in the open DV list. And this is Jonathan Naylor. I met Jonathan at the I think hamvention two or three years ago. It might have been ham kashon one of them. I met him for the first time at ham Kash and then later that year, maybe the next year, at hamvention, did an interview with him. Nice guy, very very knowledgeable in the world of MMDVM, since it is kind of

his project. So this is what he has to say. This is an open forum, This is not a private letter or anything like that, and so I'm reading public information here. It is with great regret and a certain amount of relief that I have removed M seventeen from MMDVM. I have two sets of issues with M seventeen, administrative and technical. Firstly, the administrative side of M seventeen is very worrying, and even more so in recent months. A couple of years ago, M seventeen received four hundred and

seventy eight thoy nine hundred dollars in grants from ARDC. Yes, I had Steven and ed who are Americans? Because a lot of the M seventeen stuff is being done out of Sweden. I had steven Ed, who were their American counterparts, on the live stream, two or three times to talk about M seventeen, and I'm I don't believe steven Ed or with that project anymore. Don't know why, not going to speculate, Not sure what happened there. But during that time was when ARDC had given them grant money to

fund this nonprofit open source project. Received four hundred and seventy eight thousand, ne hundred dollars in grants from IRDC developing seventeen. I feel very much that ARDC should take a closer look at how the money was spent. Okay, these are his words, not mine. The new M seventeen Foundation isn't much better. A number of the M seventeen star warts were excluded from it when it was formed. I don't know what he's talking about here, I'm just

reading this text rather more sadly. The M seventeen Foundation make no mention of a number of people organizations that it helped them to get to where they were now. Sounds like he wasn't acknowledged it and he's upset about it. But I don't know. I don't know the backstory. Okay. This is particularly troubling as it is rewriting of history and not appointing praise where it is due. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort in M seventeen and to not get their due is dishonest

of the M seventeen teen. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna take Jonathan as word here and say that this is all correct, and I agree with him if it is. Again, I don't have any inside knowledge here, I'm just reading it open for him. An example of this is the fact that only one commercial entity has put their money where their mouth is, and that is Jerry of Connect Systems. Okay,

we talked about him a minute ago. However, his contribution to the project has been belittled online by the M seventeen As his mind, despite it being the only way to get a commercial M seventeen radio, he should be praise, not dismissed out of hand. Okay, I don't know what he's talking about there either. If somebody has a link to these forums and articles that he's talking about where this has happened, please send it to me. I don't

I haven't seen that myself. I don't browse forums much these days, except for if it's on Reddit looking for stuff to talk about new videos. But here we go. I've heard rumors at M seventeen foundations looking at charging commercial entities a royalty to include M seventeen in their equipment and to use their logo. This is not in the spirit of open source and has not been the route followed by MMDBM. Now. I heard that rumor about two months ago, maybe three months ago, something like that.

I heard that rumor, and I'm like, Okay, you hear a lot of stuff. I mean, I get emails from people about all kinds of stuff. People are excited about new stuff, people are pissed off about something that happened, or people are dismayed or frustrated or whatever. I get all kinds of emails about all kinds of things. Generally speaking, most of it is noise. Some of it is very good information, and you'll usually end up seeing me make videos on that. So I actually heard this rumor a

few months ago. I didn't really put much thought into it, or much effort into I didn't put much faith in it because I'm like, well, okay, if they are charging. My understanding is ARDC only gives money to nonprofits, which M seventeen was. M seventeen Foundation was a nonprofit as far as I know, they still are. Maybe that's change. I don't know, But if you are a for profit business,

ARDC will not grant you money. I know this firsthand because I asked them for a grant because I do a lot of teaching on my channel and they're like, well, you make a profit, so we can't grant you money. I'm like, okay, that's fair. I didn't hold any begrudges against them because of that. Okay, this is their business model, this is how they do things. They were actually quite polite to me, and they said, hey, we really like what you're doing, but we can't give you any money

because you're a for profit business. I'm like, yes, I am, yes, that's true. I'm not a nonprofit. I never claim to be a nonprofit, so I get it. So in that regard, if M seventeen is going to start charging for their low to feature their logo almost like a brand ad, almost like a royalty, to put their open source codec on commercial radio and sell it, that's not nonprofit anymore. I'm gonna link this article below and I'm gonna read

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coupon code of Jason Twins. This goes on to say he said he had two points. So the first one was that the second one second secondly technical, when when started in seventeen was proudly created by people who said that they brought fresh thinking to digital voice. I would say that it characterized more by a combination of arrogance and stupidity. Again, not my words. I'm reading Jonathan's words here, and this is on an open form, not to a private letter he sent to me, because I know I'm

gonna get comments saying dude, you read that out loud. No, no, no, he wrote it out loud, and I'm just rereading it. Okay, here we go. Maybe all contact him and say, do you want to do an interview about this? The fact that none of them have ever operated digital voice radio, let alone study the DV mode was seen as positive. Really, I didn't know that none of them ever operated a

digital voice radio. Come on. One of the key members designed it like a packet radio system, where each block or packet of information needed to be received perfectly, so no forward error correction? Is that what that means? This is not a useful attribute to have. I would agree. As originally designed, the synchronization patterns were literally one bit different from one another, which is useless in an environment where signals are routinely corrupted to a greater or lesser extent.

Over the first six months of my involvement, I managed to get them to change the synchronization vectors to something more reasonable, and got them to add a can a channel access number to allow for some sort of channel sharing between the M seventeen systems. I also added things we take for granted another DV modes, like embedded GPS datas short text messages. These both run in parallel to the audio, like DSTAR or other DV modes. There were

still five big issues. A networking protocol designed before the RF protocol is established included ideas that didn't make sense in later development, very weekend of a message indicator, inclusion of optional strong encryption. This is against regulations in most countries. Shouldn't even be thought about. That's true if you're going to design a digital voice mode for amateur radio like system Fusion and d STAR war, DMR was not. That's why DMR includes encryption, because DMR and P twenty five

both are commercial protocols that we adopted as amateur radio operators. Now, sometimes I'll get people, well, since it wasn't made, since it wasn't made for amateur radio, I'm not going to use DMR well. Guess what. I don't know if you've ever heard of a little mode called continuous waves CW or a protocol called Morse code. But let me let you in on a little secret. None of that was made for amateur radio. AM and FM voice transmissions were

not made for amateur radio. RIDDY was not originally made for amateur radio. FT eight was. So if you want to drop DMR and non and commercial modes that were adopted by amateur radio simply because they weren't made for amateur radio, I hope that you only operate PSK thirty one, JT sixty five, FT eight and these times of protocols on HF because everything else that's on there pretty much was not made for amateur radio. That's a stupid argument.

I'm sorry if I offended someone by saying that. I apologize. It's a stupid argument to say that DMR and P twenty five or shouldn't be an amateur radio because they weren't made for amateur radio. Okay, But leaving that I got it, that's a bit of a tangent. I got on a bit of a tangent there, Okay. But Jonathan is correct. He says that inclusion of optional strong encryption. This is against regulations in most countries, shouldn't even be

thought about. Oddly enough, encryptid M seventeen wouldn't pass through an MMDVM based repeater. So the reason that DMR and P twenty five including encryption because they're commercial, but we're not really supposed to be using them in amateur radio on amateur radio frequencies. Now, I know some people aren't going to I suspect some people are coming along in the come as well' we use encryption all the time.

Nobody ever shows anything. Well, good for you, good for you, congratulations on not being able to read your license protocols, but good for you. Okay. Nevertheless, encryption at this point in time is not really supposed to be used by amateur radio operators on amateur radio frequencies. You want to use encryption, get a commercial radio, get a commercial frequency, you can use that on. So he's correct inclusion of

optional strong encryption. Why would you even put that in M seventeen if you're actually making it for amateur radio users and the amateur radio community as a whole. The wrong type of FCC applied badly. That FEC FOURD error correction is what that is? So few other things in here in this article, and he says he signs off with does anyone want to buy a CS seven seventeen. I've got one. That one is sitting right here. I'm not gonna. I don't want to. It's behind a bunch

of radios. I'm gonna knock everything off my desk if I try to pull it out. But hey, what do you guys think about this? Are you disappointed? I am disappointed. Let's take the article, this article at face value. Okay, let's assume for the moment, for the sake of this statement, I'm about to make that everything said in this article

is true. It's disappointing that a group who started out as open source and supportive of mateur radio and using a codec like CODEC two, which is open source and got an ARDC grant as an open source nonprofit entity, is now shifting gears and trying to charge you for and do encryption with this protocol, this M seventeen protocol. If there's much I'm sure there's more to the story.

I have no doubt there's more to the story. Okay, but if this is true, again, let's just take this phase value for the sake of this argument, then yeah, this is disappointing and I'm probably not going to be interested in using M seventeen anymore myself, not that I use it a lot anyway. I was looking forward to it. I was looking forward to getting it in more commercial radios and using it that way. I was happy about the fact that WPSD, which is upgraded version of pie Star,

included it. You get a new hotspot from Bridgecom, or you get a new hotspot any hotspot that runs WPSD M seventeen is now, or it was included voice protocol, so it was easy to talk on M seventeen and get into the get into the system if you had a radio for it. I'm, you know, hats off to Jerriett Connect Systems for actually creating a commercial radio. And I don't know, I don't know where that's going to go. So we'll see. What do you guys think about this?

Whose side are you on? Do you think you're you agree with them seventeen or do you agree with with Jonathan? Because I know a couple of people are saying that this is this is immature of Jonathan to act this way, This is childish. We need to put this back in. And I'm like, well, maybe maybe you're right, Maybe you're right, maybe right, but here's something I'm want to close with this, and no one is going to like what I well, a lot of people, a lot of people are not

going to like what I have to say. This is what you get with an open source project. Now that obvious that MMDVM is an open source project, and it's still going very strong, so obviously open source projects can work. But I have seen many times many project fall flat on their face two or three or five or six

years into the project. Open source, it's all open source, it's all open So it's open source, great, wonderful, right up until the point where the developers and the supporters and the guys in charge of it get kind of sick and tired of everyone complaining about it and just basically drop the project and say, Nope, we're not going to do this anymore. We're tired of working on it twenty to twenty five hours a week and not being

paid for it. I got other things to do with my time, like spend time with family or do my real job, which actually puts food on the table for my family, so and who can blame them? I don't blame them at all. I like the idea of open source, but I think the developers and the administrators and the project leaders and the the beta testers and these people who put all of this time into it, I don't think they get proper recognition. I don't think they get

proper recognition. And a lot of times, and I've seen it before. I could. I could name three open sources projects right now that I've seen fall flat on their face in the last ten years. I'm not gonna do that because I'm not trying to I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus. I'm not trying to talk about that. But maybe I'll just maybe I can make a different video. Maybe I can make a new video and say, hey, up, here's what I think you should

do with open source. Let's discuss it. I don't know they're wanting to charge for this protocol now why it's based on an open source codec digital Voice codec. They're not implementing it correctly according to Jonathan anyway, So I don't know. So it's is it gonna be? Is it now gonna be a for profit project that they charge for and try to build their own radios for, and they're gonna become another another Yazoo or another Kinwood, which

is okay. That's okay. You want to build a radio and charge for it, there's nothing wrong with that, But don't claim you're gonna be open source if you're gonna do that. Also, that's my opinion. A lot more to it than that. I could talk for a little bit longer, but there's a there's a mud Dauber in my hamshack. So I'm gonna sign off. Guys seventy three, i'd really want to know what your comments are. Put a comment in the VID your blow. Catch you next time.