Grant: Paving the way to use GSM/GPRS technology on amateur radio bands

ampr.org

62 points·pabs3··10 comments

Great project.

AMPR has a lot of money thanks to selling a part of the AMPRnet /8 to Amazon, and it's fantastic to see this money actually going to projects (> 1M USD alone in 2022):

https://www.ampr.org/grants/

http://www.southgatearc.org/news/2020/october/sale-of-amateu...

If you like this sort of thing, then Osmocom has other great projects going on.

http://planet.osmocom.org/

This was where I first heard the term, “retronetworking”.

You can do anything at Osmocom. Anything at all.

The only limit is yourself.

https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-fl2k/wiki in particular is my absolute favorite, turns a $10 hdmi-vga converter into a gnuradio compatible transmitter

Is this literally transmitting radio frequencies through a vga converter dongle? How far does it go?

VGA interfaces typically use a RAMDAC which is just a special purpose high speed multichannel DAC. Put the right patterns of data into video ram and you can sorta turn the thing into an arbitrary waveform generator

Wow this would be so cool.

There's few ham bands with enough bandwidth that's not already tied up in band plans. 23cm perhaps?

I wish gsm had a group call mode though. The closely related tetra standard does but it doesn't seem to have attracted much interest from hams despite having more timeslots than dmr and pretty small bandwidth requirements (25kHz iirc)

I know Osmocom projects since probably 10 years, and am an amateur radio operator since almost 20 years, but I just discover now that Osmocom is sponsored by DARC (German amateur radio club)... thanks for posting this!

This sounds awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com