Posted: 6/23/2014 4:44:12 PM EDT
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I have played with it a little, never made a QSO or even decoded anything. I met the developers at Dayton and talked to them about the Pulseaudio issue.
Looks like it could be fun and possibly really fun on QRP |
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I have used it quite a bit from the day it was released. It has a lot of issues. First and foremost, propagation conditions have to be very good for it to work well. It is most definitely not a QRP mode. And when the conditions are good enough to use it, regular analog SSB voice sounds like a million bucks so there is absolutely no advantage.
Second, the voice quality you get from the CODEC sounds like Donald Duck on helium. This is not the fault of the CODEC per se, as all low rate CODECs sound like this. And "CODEC2", the CODEC used in FreeDV, is actually a huge breakthrough in CODEC design. It is only a tiny bit worse than the king of all CODECs, MELP. MELP is a commercial product and they are not licensing it for amateur use in a freeware product like FreeDV. Indeed a previous effort called FDMDV got in big trouble for using a pirated copy of MELP code. Hence the big effort and major breakthrough (seriously) with CODEC2. Finally, the voice quality and the beeps and squawks you get when you have bad decode are very much more wearing than listening to noisy SSB signals. All of these things have caused FreeDV use to drop off to almost nothing except a hardcore of 5 or 10 guys (I am not one of them), all of whom are big guns and can practically make their own propagation. At any rate, the FreeDV watering hole is 14.236MHz. They have a "QSO finder" page as well where you can try to drum up business, but pickin's are slim these days because folks have lost interest. It's a solution looking for a problem right now. The military does a lot of low rate MELP, but they need digital encryption so it's a necessary evil. Us hamateurs don't need that sort of thing. In a somewhat ironic twist, one thing the tool IS good for is to allow use of a USB headset with your radio for regular analog SSB voice. Just put the tool in analog bypass mode and have at it. It even provides an excellent parametric EQ for both transmit and receive! |