Bridging the digital voice and data gap
Matthew Pitts <daywalker_blade_2004@...>
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Tyrell Berry <kd7kuj@...>
Not trying to start a flame war (but probably will... I'm sorry in advance), but I feel it's important to point out. Anytime you go from analog to digital, audio quality/information is lost. If you go from D* to DMR, you are taking spoken voice (analog) and making it digital (IMBE) in your radio, the repeater receives the bits and spits out audio again (digital to analog), and encodes it AGAIN as digital (AMBE) to be sent to the received, where it once again gets converted to analog. That's two A-D conversions... each loses quality, and at these bit rates, we don't have much budget for dropping additional audio info. People already complain about it sounding tinny! SO, for me it's not a religious "thou shalt not inter-connect technologies" argument, it's more of a "the sacrifices made MAY make such a project technically unfeasible" Just food for thought.
On Jul 31, 2012 6:05 PM, "Matthew Pitts" <daywalker_blade_2004@...> wrote:
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 04:34 PM 8/1/2012, you wrote:
Not trying to start a flame war (but probably will... I'm sorry in advance), but I feel it's important to point out. Anytime you go from analog to digital, audio quality/information is lost. If you go from D* to DMR, you are taking spoken voice (analog) and making it digital (IMBE) in your radio, the repeater receives the bits and spits out audio again (digital to analog), and encodes it AGAIN as digital (AMBE) to be sent to the received, where it once again gets converted to analog. That's two A-D conversions... each loses quality, and at these bit rates, we don't have much budget for dropping additional audio info. People already complain about it sounding tinny!While the codec conversions are unavoidable, you do NOT have to go all the way back to analog, if you are able to build some suitable hardware. That's already been done for D-STAR, with the DV Dongle being suitable for such a transcoder. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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Matthew Pitts <daywalker_blade_2004@...>
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 07:53 PM 8/1/2012, Matthew Pitts wrote:
Tony,Agree totally, all the supervisory information needs to be handled properly. I'd like to see this sort of work happen. As for the technologies, I'm wary of TDMA, because it has inherent range limits (since the speed of light is finite), and over here, distance is king. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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"Reid" <reid.crowe@...>
Will the UDR56K4 be able to support the switching speeds required for DMR?
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
-Reid N0RC
--- In UniversalDigitalRadio@yahoogroups.com, Matthew Pitts <daywalker_blade_2004@...> wrote:
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Bryan Hoyer <bhhoyer@...>
Hi Reid,
DMR is NOT one of the modes supported at launch. There has been some interest in DMR mostly in a future duplex repeater configuration which doesn't require turning the PA around. As a client, the architecture is able to support the timing for TDMA in the FPGA (software lacks the required granularity). and the TX/RX switch is well under the 1.5ms switch time. So that makes this a definite maybe. Bryan
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Tyrell Berry <kd7kuj@...>
Maybe your all confused... audio doesn't have to come out a speaker to be analog. To be perfectly clear, the dv-dongle is still converting a digital signal to an analog one... and a second chip is required to go into any another digital code. Even if a lossless digital codec is used in between (like wave or similar), the conversion to a lossy format like AMBE is the troublesome one... not the conversion to analog. Yes, less signal is lost vs going out a speaker and into a microphone, but the principles I stated before are largely the same, and I'm not convinced the resulting stream of bits will be legible audio. As for the conversion from fdma to tdma, if NAT can convert ip addresses, this should be easy.
On Aug 1, 2012 7:54 AM, "Reid" <reid.crowe@...> wrote:
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 01:43 AM 8/2/2012, you wrote:
Maybe your all confused... audio doesn't have to come out a speaker to be analog. To be perfectly clear, the dv-dongle is still converting a digital signal to an analog one... and a second chip is required to go into any another digital code. Even if a lossless digital codec is used in between (like wave or similar), the conversion to a lossy format like AMBE is the troublesome one... not the conversion to analog. Yes, less signal is lost vs going out a speaker and into a microphone, but the principles I stated before are largely the same, and I'm not convinced the resulting stream of bits will be legibleNo, the DV dongle converts a PCM bitstream to an AMBE coded bitstream and vice-versa. There is no analog audio near a DV Dongle (have you ever managed to get an analog signal down a USB bus? ;) ). Conversions between codecs are better when there is no intervening A/D and D/A pair to go through, so running a DV Dongle (or equivalent) back to back with an IMBE equivalent will give the best result possible. You are right in one thing, the result won't be perfect, may not be pretty, but it may be functional. Only one way to find out! :) If the number of transcodes is limited to the bare minimum (i.e. 1), then you may get along with it. Oh, and a case in point, telephony systems (e.g. Asterisk) do convert between codecs when necssary, so that you can attach any phone to the system, regardless of what code the network is running. The phone just needs to be capable of using at least one of the codecs Asterisk supports. Asterisk also decodes and recodes any participants in a conference call. Of course, most of the codecs used in telephony are a lot less "aggressive", but the principle works rather well. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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"qrv@..." <qrv@...>
This one tickled my fancy ...
toggle quoted messageShow quoted text
Perhaps one could modulate the 5v line? Just sayin' ... ;-)
Tony Langdon, VK3JED wrote: (have you ever managed to get an analog --
Thanks! & 73, KD4E.com David Colburn nevils-station.com I don't google I SEARCH! duckduckgo.com Network: groups.yahoo.com/group/qrv Restored to design-spec at Heaven's gate 1Cor15:22
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"Howard Small" <howard@...>
Hmm. Not sure how they do it but the IC-7200 passes the audio over a USB connection in parallel with the CI-V commands.
Howard VK4BS
From: UniversalDigitalRadio@... [mailto:UniversalDigitalRadio@...] On Behalf Of qrv@...
Sent: Thursday, 2 August 2012 12:01 To: UniversalDigitalRadio@... Subject: Re: [UniversalDigitalRadio] Re: Bridging the digital voice and data gap
This one tickled my fancy ...
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Ian Wade G3NRW <g3nrw-radio@...>
___Original Message_________________________________________
From: "Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...> Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2012 Time: 07:32:08 There is no analog audio near a DV Dongle (have youYup. I do it every day. On my TS-590S. Mostly analog data tones, but sometimes analog DV tones. Audio codec in the radio, codec driver in the PC. USB cable in between. Works very well. :-) -- 73 Ian, G3NRW The TS-590S Resources Page: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/wadei/ts-590s.htm The TS-990S Resources Page: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/wadei/ts-990.htm
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 12:30 PM 8/2/2012, you wrote:
Hmm. Not sure how they do it but the IC-7200 passes the audio over a USB connection in parallel with the CI-V commands.Well, that one's easy, the audio is still in digital form, it's rather like a serial dongle and a sound fob on the one USB hub. :) 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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Matthew Pitts <daywalker_blade_2004@...>
From: Tony Langdon, VK3JED ; To: ; Subject: RE: [UniversalDigitalRadio] Re: Bridging the digital voice and data gap Sent: Thu, Aug 2, 2012 10:56:09 AM
At 12:30 PM 8/2/2012, you wrote:
>Hmm. Not sure how they do it but the IC-7200 passes the audio over a >USB connection in parallel with the CI-V commands. Well, that one's easy, the audio is still in digital form, it's rather like a serial dongle and a sound fob on the one USB hub. :) 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 06:59 PM 8/2/2012, you wrote:
___Original Message_________________________________________But you are NOT passing analog audio down the USB cable. You're passing digital PCM to a USB sound device built into the radio. Semantics are important in this discussion, and my point still stands, there are no analog signals around a DV Dongle, just an AMBE coded bitstream and a PCM bitstream (plus commands to the dongle and status/responses back). 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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Tyrell Berry <kd7kuj@...>
Fair enough, I stand corrected. Even as I hit send, I more or less knew I was wrong and should have said simply "uncompressed audio". Still, every time you convert to a lossy format, audio data is lost, and we don't have much to work with from the get-go.
On Aug 2, 2012 3:22 PM, "Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...> wrote:
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Matthew Pitts <daywalker_blade_2004@...>
From: Tyrell Berry ; To: ; Subject: Re: [UniversalDigitalRadio] Re: Bridging the digital voice and data gap Sent: Thu, Aug 2, 2012 10:52:00 PM
On Aug 2, 2012 3:22 PM, "Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...> wrote:
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 08:52 AM 8/3/2012, you wrote:
Fair enough, I stand corrected. Even as I hit send, I more or less knew I was wrong and should have said simply "uncompressed audio". Still, every time you convert to a lossy format, audio data is lost, and we don't have much to work with from the get-go.True, but in my experience, there is still a big difference between transcoding to PCM and going all the way to analog and back. With the latter, you add a D/A and A/D converter, you're relying on the antialiasing/reconstruction filters to be good, and the quality of the intervening audio stages (which can be suspect in 2 way radios). You are right that there are still losses converting between the formats. Only one way to find out if it's too bad or not. ;) 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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"Tony Langdon, VK3JED" <vk3jed@...>
At 10:29 AM 8/3/2012, you wrote:
Depending on what the bit rate is for NXDN, there may only need to be a conversion to and from D-Star's bit rate; does anyone know that information off-hand? The nice thing is that we probably won't need more than one chip as long as there isn't a need to handle full-duplex digital voice.Well, what could be useful here is an interface in the UDR56K that presents the raw digital audio data, so it can be processed by an external AMBE (or whatever) decoder, making an external transcoder easier to implement. Just contributing in the brainstorming spirit. 73 de VK3JED / VK3IRL http://vkradio.com
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Bryan Hoyer <bhhoyer@...>
The UDR56K has an expansion interface which is designed for an optional ambe vocoder (it is NOTcompression).
DVSI chips are TI DSPs that are factory programmed with their code. The interface is 2 SSPs or synchronous serial port which connect directly to the Marvell SOC. The interface and drivers wil be documented. Bryan
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